To Outsource Or Not To Outsource

By Dan Smith

In my post last week regarding personal development and reviewing your positive and negative points from the past year, one of the comments was from Annette at AllCustomContent.com. She stated that her positive point from the last 12 months was that she’d streamlined a lot of her processes and developed her weaknesses by utilizing the skills of others.

I’m a massive fan of and believer in paying for others to do what you’re weak at and what they’re good at.

I always tend to offer the advice that you need to be competent in at least a basic way at every aspect of your job so that should the worse come to the worst and you need to do everything yourself, you’re capable of doing so.

However, if there are other people who specialise in an area you aren’t particularly strong in, the money spent paying them to carry it out could be the best money you’ve ever spent.

What I’ve found as a writer, though, is that we tend to be quite reclusive and secular and don’t take outside help in one respect but are the most sociable of people in another.

For instance, a lot of the writers I speak to tend to do everything themselves when it comes to actual work, taking on projects from clients where they have to write, edit and proof blog posts, website copy, press releases and news articles all at once.

Whether this is a reluctance to outsource work because they feel that they can do a great job without passing the work on or simply because they want to become a rounded writer I don’t know, but from my own personal experience, this is what I’ve found.

But then we move onto talking about writing and helping others and the freelance writing community is arguably the most helpful I’ve ever had the pleasure to work in.

Nothing seems to be too much trouble. People will answer almost any question you have and with the exception of actually going out and finding you clients, a new writer can find online every single of piece of information that they require to become an established writer — and if it’s not available, they’ve just got to ask.

I include myself in both of these points, tending to carry out every part of the actual writing process myself, but helping others whenever I can.

Lately, however, I’ve been considering hiring someone to edit my work before I send it off to the client, as I’ve realised because it’s the aspect of being a freelance writer that I enjoy least, it’s the aspect that takes up the majority of my time.

It’s something that’s a little difficult for me to organise, though. Not for the fact I can’t find a suitable editor, but because it means giving a part of my service as a writer up and I don’t want to become so reliant on someone else that should I need to start editing my own work again for whatever reason, I find it more of a chore than I do now.

But the simple fact is that I can’t take on any more work at the moment. I’ve got some clients waiting to work with me and I’d love to work with them, but unless I free up some time — with the easiest way being by removing the editing side from my work — I’m going to be staying in somewhat of a Catch 22 situation.

And now I’ve said all of that, I’m excited. Since I’ve really taken freelance writing as a career seriously, I’ve spent the last 8 months working full to capacity, only taking on new clients when I’ve finished working with an existing one.

Should I go ahead and hire an editor, I’ll be able to begin working with clients who I’ve been wanting to work with for a while, as well as looking at increasing my workload with current clients and developing my own projects, including my own blog.

Let the good times roll! (hopefully!)

Do you outsource any part of your work writing work? Has it benefited you or have you found it to be a hindrance?

I’m particularly interested in hearing from writers who’ve taken on people to carry out more unusual outsourced activities, such as finding and / or pitching for projects.