An Underestimated Disadvantage with Outsourcing

by Francis
(October 21, 2012)

You lose the experience from learning by doing and doing experiments.

One possible disadvantage you’ll have to face when you get involved with outsourcing is that when you delegate all your work to someone else, you lose the benefit of learning by doing.

Many tasks and a lot of experience you gain are gained by actually doing the tasks.

If you delegate everything that you should do to your virtual assistant, it is him and not you who will gain knowledge and skills. You’ll have to find a fine line of balance between delegating your work and learning by doing it yourself.

The best method of delegating your work to an outsourced virtual assistant, in my opinion, is to do the following:

1. Do the task yourself. No matter how simple it is. No matter how long it takes. Do it yourself so often that you can do it easily.
2. Record how you do all the steps either via video or audio.
3. Give your step by step work instructions to your virtual assistants.
4. Have your virtual assistant do a test run, duplicating your efforts.
5. Evaluate how well your virtual assistant did. If he didn’t do well, fine tune your instructions until your virtual assistant gets it right.

Finally, enjoy your work getting done by a virtual assistant while you got to learn the skills in the process. That’s how I do it and that’s how I think everyone who hires a virtual assistant should do it.

You can read more about training your Virtual Assistant with purpose and a strategy in mind in this post.

• If you don’t learn the process you wanted to outsource thoroughly yourself, then you have two problems.

• You will not be able to find a replacement for your VA quickly if you need to rehire.

And you’ll need to have the newly hired VA figure out the whole process a second time, needlessly costing you time and money.

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