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West: I was having lunch with Gayle not too long ago and Gayle wanted me to come along
and give you some value with regards to outsourcing. So I put together a presentation for you guys
as business owners.
Can I just get an indication of who owns a business in the room? I wasn’t here in the
first hour. I apologize for that. Ooh, geez. Big number.
Who’s sort of like a manager, a general manager or operations manager? Yup. Cool.
Excellent. Fantastic.
I’m here for one reason and one reason only. And that is to help you guys identify hidden
profit centers in your business; but not only that, I want you to actually find and build
a team to be able to maximize those hidden opportunities. At the end of the 45 minutes
where I’ll be speaking, you guys are going to be very excited about outsourcing even
if you think that at this point in time it doesn’t apply to you at all.
What I’m going to show to you today, I’m going to show you the exact sites that I use
and that 7 figure businesses use to outsource for their businesses. I’m going to show
you the exact process they go through. I’m going to show you what to write, how to write
it. I’m going to pack as much as I can for 45 minutes. I’m going to speak fast because
I originally did have 60 minutes. We’re going a little bit overtime and I like to
respect people’s time.
So let’s get started with the presentation.
Now I got this diagram from a gentleman called Rich Schefren. Has anyone here heard of Jay
Abraham? If you’re in business, you’ve probably heard of the guy. He’s like a marketing
god. He’s very highly respected. Rich Schefren works a lot with Jay. He’s coming into his
own these days with regard to business, getting offline and online businesses happening.
[Insert Diagram]
Now he released this in a report called The Manifesto. And it was designed for people
like internet marketers who are looking at getting staff online. Now, people in this
room are business owners. So a lot of this stuff probably won’t apply to you. However,
a lot of this stuff will apply to you. And I’m assuming over the last two days or so,
your head has been spinning with opportunities and things you have to do. Has anyone sort
of gone away with information overload or stuff that you’ve got to go and get done?
That happens a lot obviously and it’s stuff that you definitely do need to get done.
Well, what I’m here to say is that you don’t have to do it yourself. You guys heard Sue
speak yesterday, is that correct? Sue wrote a press release recently. I don’t know whether
any of you saw it. It was about being the laziest man in Australia, I think it was.
So she just wrote an article about myself and how I run several online businesses but
I hardly do any work and I’m always out in the golf course or in the gym or doing
something else that has nothing to do with work. And I’m going to tell you today exactly
how I achieved that.
So what it boils down to for many of you, when you walk away from here…you obviously
probably have an organizational chart in your organization. But that’s the reality of
it, isn’t it? You guys are doing everything. And I want to shift your mindset from going
away from here and wanting to do everything yourself to instead of asking the question
‘How am I going to do this,’ ask the question ‘How can I get this done by someone else.’
The Hedgehog and the Fox
And I want to tell you really briefly about a book that I recently read. Has anyone read
the book, Good to Great, by Jim Collins? A couple of people. It’s a fantastic little
book. I’ll talk more about it later and I will show you the hedgehog concept that
we talked about. He talks about two characters in the book: a hedgehog and a fox.
Now a fox, when it’s hungry, it tries to search for food wherever it searches for food.
If it sees the hedgehog, he will try and eat the hedgehog. Now, foxes are very intelligent.
They’re very cunning. They like to try different strategies. They’re like trying to dig burrows,
they’ll try picking up things and try to roll them over, whatever it is that they try
and do. Hedgehogs, they’re good at a lot of little
things. Once, he was talking before and he showed that picture of a big Swiss Army knife.
I’m trying to make the same point here. A hedgehog does one thing really, really well.
A hedgehog, what does it do when it’s in trouble? It rolls up into a little ball, puts
his spikes out. And the fox, no matter what it does, it will never ever be able to penetrate
that. So the hedgehog knows time and time again it’s going to come out on top. And
the fox will always try and diversify and try all these different strategies on how
to get that meal and the hedgehog will win every time.
So the reason I tell you that story is because many of you might feel like the fox or identify—everyone
in this room is either a hedgehog or a fox. You’re someone who, when they see an opportunity,
they like to go and chase it. They might chase it for a little bit and then they’ll pull
back. And they’ll see another opportunity, they might chase that a little bit, they’ll
pull back. And they might see another opportunity… When you finish the workshop today, you’ll
go home and you think, ‘Oh, I’ve got to start all these different things. You’ve
got to start eBay, you’ve got to start copywriting for my site. Is anyone like that now? They’ve
got a big, big list of things they want to start doing? Yeah. So you guys are foxes if
you’re going to do it yourself.
The hedgehog will know exactly what they’re good at. So what are your core skills? Where
do you bring most value to the market? And they outsource the rest. So they get the rest
done by someone else. And that’s a really powerful concept. And if you take anything
away from today, that would be it.
Work to Outsource
So here are a couple of things that I personally have outsourced. Now it may not apply to you
in business, like in small business—‘coz I don’t know the small business so I can’t
talk definitively on that—but these are things that might be able to help you in your
marketing, in your website, in your traffic conversion. You’ve been learning a lot about
online strategies this weekend. I’ve actually personally heard every speaker that you’ve
heard this past two days at another seminar so I know what they’re all about. I know
what they stand for.
In terms of getting graphics done, I’ve had headers, banners, buttons—all these
little things on your site. They can make your site look pretty. They can make help
people direct their attention into certain areas down on your site.
I’ve had an eBay account set up. What I had done recently, our case study, eBay is a great way to drive traffic to your
site. And I’m not going to talk about eBay ‘coz you’ve already heard about it but
I’ll show you a case study today of how I got an account set up. I’ve got feedback
all set up. I’ve got all my listing set up. I got everything automated on eBay to
be able to drive traffic to a site and I paid pittance for it. So I’m going to show you
how I did that.
Ghostwriting. I recently co authored a book with Andrew Grant. We’ve sort of got the
first draft done but I outsourced all the content for that. I outsourced someone to
put the whole book together, outsourced the graphics for that. And all it took was a couple
of paragraphs written on paper and a little bit of money. So if you are in business right
now, in any industry that you are or field that you’re in that you can add value, like
teaching people how to do what you do, teaching other businesses in your industry to do what
you do, make money in a more efficient or a more effective way…if you’re able to
do that and put that into a book, obviously, don’t sit there and write it yourself. You
might write an outline of what you want and then get it outsourced or ghostwritten (is
the term).
So guys like Robert Kiyosaki, Brad Sugars—you may have heard of these guys—they run really,
really big businesses and they have a long line of books that they put out but they don’t
write any of them themselves. They may have their name on the cover but they’ve all
got it ghostwritten. I mean they’re out there doing $300, $400 million dollar deals.
They’re not going to have time to sit down and pump out a 250 page book and Robert seems
to come out with one every couple of months. So that’s saying that you should truly consider—because
it obviously gives you credibility as well as a business owner and it improves awareness
of what you do generally as a business.
Salescopy is very, very important for your site.
One thing I would point out here is I want to talk later on about how to get really good
deals on outsourcing. I don’t want you to skimp for the sake of saving a few bucks.
For example, if you want to outsource your Google campaign—I strongly recommend doing
that—you go to someone who knows what they’re doing. You don’t want to get someone who’s
giving you a really cheap option and not giving you the best service available. So there are
instances where you definitely get what you pay for. But for the purposes of today, I’ll
show you which task you should be outsourcing, which task that you should probably give to
a very highly trained professional because it’s very important for your business.
Blogs. I’ve had sites where I wanted to increase traffic to and paid a very little
amount of money to get someone to build a blog (?) [09:17] on the site, to optimize
it for keywords, etcetera, etcetera. Again, probably Barnaby talked to you about blogs.
He’s offering good package options. That’s something that will be very useful for you
as well. But if you want to just optimize your website for certain keywords and you
don’t want a massive big package, you can just log on an extra blog page to your website
and we’ll help you in some capacity.
I’ve also had voiceovers done. We had a site that was selling an ebook with some friends
and we wanted to capture the traffic by getting someone to actually give someone a nice warm
welcome. So if you have got a site that is currently very static, it doesn’t have any
video or audio that welcomes people, talks people through the process, maybe a bit of
a navigation through the site, I strongly recommend. All you need to do is come up with
a script and you can get that voiceover as well. And that was very handy for me.
So here are a few other things in your business that might be more applicable that I’ve
listed out here. And I want you to take a note—because in a second I’m going to
get you to write down three or four things that you believe in your business is going
to make a big difference to your time and to your bottomline.
Product duplication and product fulfillment. I believe any business in this room today
could benefit from potentially posting up marketing materials or communication avenues
with their clients on a more regular basis.
Is Clem in the room? Clem is the guy who fulfills DVDs, CDs and a lot of the information products
for the Grants. Now the Grants were telling me that they were getting a lot of questions
before so I just thought I’d mention Clem. Tell us a bit about what you do, Clem.
Clem: My company’s called Action AV. And basically what we do is we duplicate print
and fulfills CD and DVDs. So as far as Andrew and Daryl’s business is concerned, what
they do is they send us all their sales material and information on CD and DVD. They send us
the label art, the covers—just everything—booklets, whatever goes into the kit, and we do the
complete copy, print pack and even fulfill. So they’ll send us a list of clients the
kits have to go to and we’ll express post or send by certified mail to everyone on that
list; and so basically, from start to finish, but that entire list is catered for. And that’s
what we specialize in.
West: Can anyone here see the value of keeping in touch, regular contact with their clients
or providing materials, information products or even just regular contact on newsletters
and stuff like that? I mean, I recently heard on eBay you can’t actually sell digital
items on there anymore. It’s been a rule that they’re implementing in a couple of
days time I think. If you are generating traffic from selling free reports or digital items,
digital audios—anything digital—on eBay, they’re going to remove and ban every single
item listed on that. So that’s a bit of a revelation. And it’s good news for Clem
because you can still keep in touch with your clients and still generate that traffic. But
you’re going to have to do it by fulfilling an order.
So Clem’s going to be hanging around a bit later on. If you want to have a chat with
him, just come and see him. Cool. Thanks Clem!
Clem: Thank you.
West: Beautiful.
So I was pretty shocked about that eBay thing as well because I had some stuff on eBay.
But what that means is it’s going to cut the tire kickers—so to speak—who are flooding
eBay with a lot of junk and selling really, really cheap stuff. It also prevents people
from manipulating the feedback system because one of the things I did—and eBay would call
that manipulation but it is legal—is to when you first open an eBay account, you get
someone to buy 10, 30, 40, 50 different ebooks—really cheap ones, obviously—between 1 and 99 cents
and then you leave feedback for all of those people. Now within two days, you can get your
rating up to 50 to 100, which enables you to open a store, enables you to link a Paypal
account, enables you to put BUY IT NOW listings—all these things you cannot do without 15 or more
feedback. I don’t know whether the rules have changed in recent times. So that’s
one of the things I got done.
You’ve probably heard of these before. I’m going to tell you about a couple of sites
that you probably haven’t heard of before but that I use:
Elance. Elance tends to be more for writing. So if you’re looking for a ghostwriter for
Who here has like a list of people that they never keep in contact with? They’ve got
a database of people that they’re just sort of letting them slide by not maintaining that
relationship. You can tell these writers what you want done and then they’ll actually
do it to your specifications.
Now I’m going to tell you a few things about these sites. They work in a reverse bidding
process. So I’m sure you know how eBay. So what happens on eBay is you have an item,
so let’s say it’s a tennis ball. On eBay, people would bid starting at 0$ and they’ll
a very valuable tennis ball. And it ends up selling for $15. So that’s the normal bidding
process (or auction process).
What happens on this site (e.g. Elance) is you put a project on—so let’s say you
want to get a book written. Let’s say you’re in the health and fitness industry and you
want to author a book to teach businesses how to exponentially improve their profits
by incorporating personal training into their business. So you want that book written. What
people will do is they’ll come in at a certain price, say, $450. “I’ll do it for $450.”
Then another person says, “I’ll come and do it for $250.” Another person says, “I’ll
do it for $100.” So it’s kind of a reverse bid. Now people will continue to try and outbid
themselves so they can get your business. It’s a great little process. I don’t always
recommend going with the lowest bidder simply because you tend to get what you pay for.
But there are certain steps that you can go through to really minimize the chance to something
nasty will happen for you.
Now the other thing that I want to tell you is this—and it’s really awesome for minimizing
risk—is that when you accept the bid, it goes into escrow. You put your money with
that site and they keep it at the site. They don’t give it to the coder. They keep it
at that site in escrow. Now you will work with that coder until project completion and
when you are 100 percent happy with everything that they’ve done. Or they don’t get paid
a single cent. If you’re never happy, you’ll never pay them. How cool is that? So with
the escrow process, you can almost guarantee that you’ll get a—
Because these guys, they are hungry for getting it done. Because it means if they get it done,
Because you are helping them and they are helping you and it’s a fair deal. And they
put in the amount of money that they are willing to do the work for. So that’s another thing
you should know about those sites.
So clearly that’s how it works. You’ll have to come up with the cash but you don’t
release the cash until all the work is done and you’re happy with it. It’s very, very
cool. It’s one way to ensure that you get a good product.
Scriptlance and Rentacoder (now VWorker). They are sites that you go to, to get programs
and technical stuff done. It’s so much like an endless abundant field where you can dictate
what you want done in a program or what you want done in an application. And you can put
it on Rentacoder or Scriptlance and you’ll be absolutely blown away with the kind of
responses you will get. I mean something that you think will take years, some coder will
come up with, you know, “I can do that for you in three days at $250,” and you’ll
be blown away. And it will make a huge difference to the quality of your offerings to your clients
So for example, again, going back to personal training—because that’s the industry I
on when the clients trained, that sort of stuff. So it’s just a program that really,
smart back then I would’ve licensed that to other trainers, which I didn’t. I just
I’m trying to give the examples as much as I can but I want you guys to always be
Guru is another website. Guru.com. It’s another website you go to that you can get
So what we’re going to do now is go through the list that you created. I had a look through
been actually filling out all the actions they need to be doing as a result of the workshop?
Well, if you haven’t, I want you to take 2 3 minutes right now to list out five things
in your business—it might be a process, it might be something you want to get done
for marketing, it might be anything that helps with your bottomline or helps you to save
expenses—that you think might be worthwhile getting someone else to do. And then I’m
going to talk through this process and you might be able to think as I’m talking. So
take 2 3 minutes. If you need to talk to your manager or your boss, then feel free to do
that. I’m going to give you a couple of minutes to do that. I’m happy to answer
questions in the meantime. So take 2 3 minutes, think about your business process. You might
now that you shouldn’t be.
What you do is you go to the site, you get an account in the site; so all those sites
that I’ve put up there, get an account at all those sites. It’s absolutely free. You
don’t have to pay anything. The only thing you pay is you actually pay the coder for
the work. Now the way these sites make money is they take a percentage of what the coders
get paid. So they might take anywhere from five to fifteen percent. So if you pay a coder
coders that would otherwise bid higher. It’s also a good idea to let the coder know that
as a CEO or a Managing Director of a company, ‘I’m not going to be involved with this,’
you’re telling me that you want to get some sort of knowledge or you want to get more
for a week. I can always start in two weeks time,’” then obviously that’s not going
package for your clients and all their past projects have been writing projects, then
in my project and I say, “When you reply, please reply with the secret code.” Now
no matter what it is. If they take three, four or five days to get back to you, that’s
commissioning a coder. Then you’ll actually get a blacklist. And you don’t want that
sort of stay away from them. But if you ask them about what you do, you can get coders.
a big significant project that needs to be done, that needs to be researched, she would
of eBay to their business, can use eBay in some way, shape or form to help improve their
tedious to do it. And if you’re not versed with computers, if you’re not internet marketing
have their—remember I was discussing about the ratings? It is a bit like eBay. This gentleman
And I’m going to go through this really quickly before I wrap up. The hedgehog concept
I talked about the hedgehog and the fox. The fox is all over the place. The hedgehog stays
so that you can start making money and then focus on the others. I guess I wanted to touch
more for certain things than other things; there are certain brackets you need to stay
those kinds of things. We take them. We absolutely grill them and we share that with you in that
you today and you can run with that. That’s fine. You’ll actually do really well and
come in today, we’re going to be getting together on a weekly basis. We’re going
written down for you; this is my second valuable guarantee—if you don’t get at least $5,000
at doing something like that. It doesn’t have to be online it can be offline as well.
You’ve been a great audience. Thank you very much�