How do you compare outsourcers? Especially when you keep hearing about outsourcing to the Philippines for $10 an hour, how do you work out who to hire? If someone is more experienced and skilled but charges £25-£50 an hour, how can that be better? What’s the cost of having to train someone?

At the end of the day, you can delegate tasks but you can’t delegate responsibility for your business.

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Clicks And Leads is a “tongue in cheek” digital marketing Vzine by entrepreneur, author, podcaster, speaker, Nicola Cairncross.

Mentioned in the Vzine

• My Cousin Vinny
• Are you an MD who wants a flash briefing to bring you up to speed with online marketing? Email Nicola now
• My sister Sarah Cairncross who is available for Tech / VA / Operations support
• Clicks And Leads 365 – Alexa Skills
• Write Club The Podcast

On the blogs

Vzine 073 | What Are You Avoiding Doing?
Vzine 072 | Alexa Skills Goes Live!
Own It! 186 | Heather Waring: Peeing in the Wilderness
Own It! 185 | Toxic People

Prefer to read?

Hi, it’s Nicola here and I have reached that part of the year where I have to record inside because the cicadas and the birds are very noisy outside at the moment. So, you can probably still hear the cicadas but I’ve turned the fan off. It’s going around a little bit up there.

Yeah, well, what I want to talk to you about this week, is about valuing yourself and also about how to charge when there’s people in other countries that charge much less than you do.

But, before that, I just wanted to quickly update you on what’s been going on this week. I’ve been out this week to cook for some friends who had a fall together. They’re a little bit elderly, and I went around last night to cook, and we watched a fantastic movie called My Cousin Vinny, which I’ve never seen before and it was really, really funny. Really well-written and set in the 80’s, so the outfits are absolutely hilarious. Highly recommend that.

My friends, Kim and Jeremy, they were staying in Stoupa last week, and I ended up having a one-hour session with Jeremy like a flash briefing, if you like, for MDs because he’s the MD of a big company, and he always feels like he’s on the back foot when it comes to internet marketing, when people sort of say things to him about what they should be doing or parent companies come in, and in fact pitch to him.

So we had a one-hour session and I brought him up to speed on all things internet marketing, so hopefully he’ll be able to hold his own a bit better. He said that he had no idea of the potential for Facebook ads, particularly for one of their consumer-facing brands, and he was very reassured that everything is trackable, and you can work out exactly how much you’re spending, which ads are bringing in the prospects, which ads are bringing in the sales, so he loved all that, the data-driven element of it all.

So, yeah, I’m thinking of doing that, so if you’re an MD or business owner and you just wanted to hire me for an hour to talk about your business, and what your strategy could be, so that you, then, can go back and talk to your team or talk to people who are pitching digital marketing services, don’t hesitate to get in touch because I really liked, enjoy talking to Jeremy about that. So just email nicola@nicolacairncross.com and we can set that up for you.

Let’s get on with the show shall we?

So this week I wanted to talk to you about a conversation I had with Sarah, my sister, who is an extremely talented tech person. She is the person who makes sure that my Be Everywhere Online strategy is implemented across all the different platforms. She’s the one I turn to if I want to find out how to do something new, like Alexa skills thing that we just put on Amazon.

And we were having this conversation because she was listening to us recording the podcast, and we were talking about how you can still outsource to the Philippines or places like that, Eastern Europe, for a very low fee indeed. And she said that really, we were being a bit irresponsible because we were making people believe that they could outsource everything to really super-talented people for not very much money per hour. And that is true, you can do that, but what you’re not going to be able to do is delegate responsibility to those people.

So it’s going to be easy if you want a script, tick list kind of task done, and you’ve got the time to make a video and train these people, then you’re going to be able to get lots of stuff done very cheaply indeed.

But, what Sarah, and people like Sarah bring to the table is that one, they might charge more per hour. They bring an awful lot of experience and skills to the table so they know how to use the software, they don’t have to learn, so that makes them a lot quicker at setting things up than someone from the Philippines or Eastern Europe would be, for example.

Also, Sarah can look at something and say, she knows about marketing funnels, she knows about sales funnels, she knows about what should happen after an opt-in, she knows about what should happen after someone buys your product or service. They should be moved from your prospect list to your customer list, and she would know how to set that up so it happens automatically.

So, although there’s a higher price point per hour to hire someone like Sarah, and you can do that, by the way, at SarahCairncross.com, you are getting someone who is just as good as an entrepreneur in knowing how these things need to work.

She’s got a very entrepreneurial mindset and she would know what an entrepreneur would want to happen and she can make it happen. And she can also give you strategic advice which not many people from the Philippines or Eastern Europe would be able to do.

So, although you pay a higher cost per hour hiring someone like Sarah, and there are other people out there like her, talented tech VAs or operations managers. I prefer to think of her as my operations manager. Then you just have to realise that you can hire people like her, you’re going to pay a bit more per hour but you’re going to get someone who’s got a brain and who is not just literally following your instructions and doing tasks on the tick list as completed.

It depends on what you want, you know? If you’re willing to train, you can pay less per hour. If you want to jump straight in and have someone who’s going to be capable of being your right-hand person straight away, you’re going to pay more per hour, but you’ll get more done in that hour and it will probably be done right, whereas you’re probably going to have to supervise, at least for a while, your people that you’re paying less per hour.

So I wanted to set that right. You know, you’re the one who’s in charge of your business. You’re the one who needs to take responsibility for outcomes. You’re the one who needs to be on top of it at all times and you cannot ever delegate that to anyone else.

It’s hard to find good business partners and I’ve covered that in one of my previous Vzines. And, if you want to start up in business because you want someone to delegate responsibility to, I wouldn’t recommend it. You’ve always got to take responsibility for your own business.

Hope that helps, and I also hope it helps put the record straight on the inexperienced and unskilled cheap people per hour versus people with brains and experience and who have experience using the software and setting up funnels at slightly more per hour. That’s what you get. You pays difference and you takes your choice.

So on the blog and the podcast this week, on episode 186 of Own It, we’re talking to Heather Waring, who’s got a really unusual business. She takes female business owners out to walk and be coached while they’re walking.

She does all sorts of interesting things like the Camino Way and things like that, and one of the really useful things we learned from Heather was how to actually have a pee in the wilderness without actually showing yourself up too much, which was very useful indeed.

And then on episode 73 of the Vzine, I was talking about what you’re actually avoiding doing. I’ve been rather avoiding recording this Vzine episode because I didn’t know what to talk about, so I wanted to just talk about in last week’s Vzine how to make yourself do the things that you’re avoiding, the things you know you should be doing but you’re just simply not for one reason or another.

Yeah, and I just wanted to say thank you very much to everyone who has listened to or downloaded or subscribed to the Clicks and Leads daily briefing, ClicksAndLeads365.com, if you go there you’ll find a daily business marketing or money briefing, and we’ve had over 200 downloads in the first week, so I’m really pretty pleased with that.

It’s not just on Alexa skills, it’s on all good podcast platforms and YouTube too. So, if you fancy subscribing to that and just getting one short, one to three minute tip every day that’s where you’ll find it. ClicksAndLeads365.com. Speak to you next week!

Creative Direction & Video Editing
Phoebe Soremekun

Intro Music
Pool Cosby

Incidental Music
Chill Motivational Lo-Fi Hip-Hop Instrumental – The Process // No Copyright Music

Drone footage of The Mani
Georgios Ser-Aouas

Check out more videos on my YouTube channel