Why I Outsource My Back Office

I think I am a pretty rare breed amongst sales reps in our industry. I can sell AND I can handle the details when it comes to back office work like proofs from factories, reconciling the supplier bills, accounting, payroll and general customer service. 

The problem is I HATE dealing with the parts of the business that don’t make me money. And as you may recall, I make my money by focusing on increasing my total gross profit dollar volume.  This involves sales, business development and being out with the clients and prospects.

When I ran my own distributorship, I was spending 75%+ of my time on the things that distracted me from the sales and didn’t make me money … employee issues, cash flow challenges and general back office administrative tasks that seemed to be never ending. So, almost 10 years ago I decided to outsource my back office. 

Sure I could handle all the work myself and keep 100% of the gross profits. But I hated doing it.  And I couldn’t figure out how to make the cash flow work, no matter how hard I tried.

My theory (which proved to be correct) was that if I could free myself up to focus on the parts of the business I loved (selling, training and coaching) and hand off the rest, I would generate more sales and gross profit dollars.  Ultimately making me more money AND helping me find enjoyment and fun in this business.

By outsourcing the back office, it has freed me up to be super focused on my clients and implement best practices for growing my sales and my business. It also has freed up my schedule to allow me time to “think” and try new strategies for growth. It’s afforded me the freedom of schedule and “bandwidth” to create. Thus giving my clients/prospects better ideas for their promotional needs, giving my licensees better ideas and angles for opening doors and closing deals, and last but certainly not least, giving me the idea for building a residual income model for the promotional products business.

Doing the Parts of Sales that I Love and Handing off the Rest

How great does this sound There?

In a recent post I shared a story about choosing the parts of work/business you love and not just doing the other tasks because I was either good at them or felt I was the only person in my business who could do it- sound familiar?

So here’s the next step – identify the parts you don’t enjoy and figure out a way to hand them off!

I have built my entire swag business and career around the parts of business that I enjoy most (like coaching, relationship-building and business strategy/art of the deal) and that make me the happiest, and have outsourced the parts of the business I simply don’t like, even though a few I am pretty darn good at (like order processing, accounting, inventory management). 

So where has this gotten me you ask…well, aside from the mental anguish I no longer battle on a daily basis, and the enjoyment I get from the work I am doing because it’s the work I WANT to be doing, I am also making 5X more money now vs what “I was great at” and doing back then.

Here’s a quick personal exercise.  Take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle of it.  On the left, put the header “Work Things I Love” (to do).  On the right, put the header “Work Things I Hate”.  Take the money component out of it and really be honest with yourself… what really are the things you love?   Are you tracking me?  Like below…

 

Work Things I LOVE   Work Things I HATE

Art of the Deal    Cold Calling

Coaching & Mentoring   Office Politics

Sales with a Focus on Profit  Waiting to Get Paid on Sales I Have Already Closed

Being “Out” meeting/networking     Stuck at a Desk doing Admin work

Smart Technology Manually having to Do Everything in this business

Getting Referrals    Dealing with Accounting Inquiries

Partnering with Best-in-Class people Dealing with the idiots in our industry

Making $ on Other People's Sales Cash Flow Stresses and losing sleep 

See how easy it is to identify the things in work that make you happy and you enjoy?

Can you claim to be spending at least 75% of your time on these things?  Can you even do that the way your sales job or business is structured?

Why or why not?

So how do you go about incorporating them into your everyday work life, or begin looking for a career/business change that can check those “Love to Do” boxes for you?  I can show you how I did it!