Hey, Mike Agugliaro, business ninja, founder of the $23 Million Dollar Business Blueprint and Service Business Warrior Mastermind, greatest mastermind on the planet, bringing you today outsourcing and crowd sourcing. Awesome subjects, not very known in the service industry, not known in a lot of industries, but amazing power to understand these two things.
So what is outsourcing? Outsourcing is when you can go to someone else who’s going to do a job for you at a price and deliver you something. Let me give you an example. There’s a couple of companies out there. One of them’s called Elance, one’s oDesk.com, and these companies are, you can actually reach out to people. They’re all over the world and I’m only going to be able to cover a little portion of this, so I’m just going to scratch the surface here. I can ask them to do things. I say, “Hey, I need a letter written up to a customer that’s going to explain why I’m sorry for something.” And they’ll do that for a couple bucks. Or, “I want you to check all my emails everyday and respond to emails for me,” or “I want you to schedule my appointments for me.” Even some of these people will answer calls for you. They’re all over the world and they’ll work, since they’re outsourced and they might be working out of their home, where you might be paying somebody 15 bucks an hour or 18 bucks an hour, you could sometimes get people at 6 or 7 bucks an hour because maybe they’re handicapped or something or can’t leave the home, but they have amazing skill sets.
Another example of outsourcing/crowd sourcing is, there’s a company called 99designs.com. Now, for marketing, it’s amazing. I’ll give you an example of what I did many years ago, 6-7 years ago. I wanted to develop some really cool, tripped-out t-shirts. It was for the firewalking stuff that I was doing then. Well, I still do the firewalking, but it was back then I wanted to build these cool t-shirts, so I went on this 99designs and I just posted a contest with a reward and I said, “Hey, I’ll give $250 to anybody who nails this bad-ass, tripped-out t-shirt. Which by the way, I’d never got one printed but I still have the cool design. Maybe someday I’ll put it out. So before you know it, I post this contest and I have over 300 people from around the globe, Australia, Canada, China, everywhere, giving me hundreds of designs to look at. To the point I was like, yes, no, yes, no, and narrowed it down to two really great, skilled people, all right? At the end, the one just won. He nailed it, he was willing to make changes after the fact, even after the contest was rewarded. He got the reward, which he did, he made an amazing design. The shirt’s awesome. But imagine the power of a contest like that, and that’s where it’s crowd source. I’m getting information from a lot of different people.
Richard Branson actually did this with that Galactica, that kind of airplane ship that goes above the earth and you can look down but you’re not in outer space. I don’t know if he gave a million or 10 million, but he said, “Look, I’ll give this money to anybody who nails this design.” So there’s one example, or a couple of examples.
Another thing was, at one time I had a … I think it was the American Express or one of the Visa business cards. They actually have a concierge service that will help find things. So I actually called them up during lunch. I was doing a little even years ago, and I called them up and I said, “Hey, I need a 5-gallon pail of cheese. Can you find it for me?” “Yes, sir, Mr. Agugliaro, we’ll get back to you in a couple of hours.” They called me back. Who would know that you could get a 5-gallon pail of cheese? So then I said, “Oh, okay, thank you. I need one more thing. Hey, we’re doing this seminar and I’m proving how you can outsource things and get other people to do work for you and you’re thanking me for giving you work, which I love. I mean, how many employees are like, ‘Give me more work?'” So I said, “Find me a 50 lb. candy bar.” 30 minutes later, 50 lb. candy bar.
Now somebody in the event said to me, “Yeah, but what about a business thing, like a software system?” I said, “Cool. Let’s see if we can find them.” So I told the woman, “I’m in this business, I need a software system.” Comes back with four software systems. It happens that one of the software systems was the one I was on at the time. So here’s just another example that when you become resourcefulness and you could kind of look out there, what other kind of resources. Because the biggest complaint as service business owners and people in general have this, “Mike, I don’t have enough time.” I don’t know, everybody has the same amount of time but some people manage it and become millionaires and billionaires with that amount of time, and some people manage to not get there. So I think it’s how you look at your time, and not only how you look at your time, what are you able to outsource to other people at very reasonable prices to get things done quicker, faster, easier?
I’ll give you another example. All the time I see people, business owners, cutting their grass. Now if you love it and it’s a hobby and you’re out there with the weed whacker, I mean I used to do it years ago, too, and then I was sick 5 times a year from the pollen and stuff. But when you look at what you could pay someone to cut your lawn, like the person that cuts my grass cuts the lawn, picks the weeds out of the flower beds and stuff, trims, rake the leaves, I don’t have to do anything. I just walk in the lawn, enjoy it, then I walk back in. When you look at what they do that for, like 25 bucks an hour or something, compared to my amount of time that I value at a couple thousand dollars an hour, it doesn’t make sense for me to do that stuff unless it was a hobby.
So today, I challenge you to look at what you’re struggling to get done and ask yourself, is it, I don’t know how to do it and find somebody, or is, I know what to do but I don’t have the time to do it, and find a company or something to outsource. Or is it something on trying to create, or I want to build, and crowd source it.
All right, I’m Mike Agugliaro. I’m wishing you a better than outsource, crowd source day, and I want to help you get tons of wealth, right? And tons of freedom, massive wealth, tons of freedom, market domination and everything in between. That’s what I want to do. Go outsource.
