One Thing I'll Never Outsource

If you know me, you’ll be aware that I’ve got a pretty large team of freelancers under me, and that I tend to outsource a lot of things to them.

Over the years, I built up this team and gradually outsourced more and more, and found ways to systematize outsourcing. It’s not easy to just find a freelancer and give them tasks and hope for the best, so it took me a long time to learn the right way to do it.

Being able to pay for other people’s work is vital to scaling. Instead of 1 person working 40 hours on your business (you), you can have 10 people working 40 hours, which is 400 hours per week on your biz.

Of course, you can’t just do this right away, you have to build up to it by learning first and then as you earn, you delegate.

I just wanted to illustrate the point of how much I outsource and how much can be outsourced.

But the point of this post is actually to talk about one thing I’d never outsource..

Focus.

It might sound pretty obvious, but focus is what drives your business forward, and I’ve never found a way of effectively pawning it off to somebody else.

To some degree you may be able to incentivize your main staff to focus for you, but you’ll always get better results if you’re still the driving force in your business.

Now, focus doesn’t mean “Just work on one website” and it doesn’t mean “Do the same thing over and over again”.

It means to make your online business a large part of what you do. Whether you’re a beginner who is just learning how to write content and rank it, or you’re someone like me with a number of sites and dozens of people on the payroll.

Focus means waking up and thinking about your business, it means spending a few hours every day working (even if that work is different), and it means building traction.

Whenever I’ve started a side-project and not given it my true attention, it’s failed pretty miserably.

However, when you take the time to push something forward all the time, and devote some mental attention to it, you do see things starting to fall together.

I also wanted to address the “Work on one site at a time” myth.

For most people, focusing on just one site may well be the best course of action, but when I first started, I had three sites.

Was I focused on each site fully? No, probably not.

But I was still focused fully on growing my business and for me that meant working on three sites at once, because I wanted to see one of them get traction.

I would sit down every day and write 1 article for each site, then go do some other stuff for each site. Even though my time was split, I still spent 4-5 hours per day working, so my focus carried over to three sites.

Again, I’m not saying you should only work on 1 site or you should definitely work on multiple, but what you absolutely need to do is take this seriously and focus on making it happen.

When you devote your energy to something, that energy eventually aligns with your goals. Einstein said it himself, it’s just physics.