Page 193 - The $100 Startup_ Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love

a design services business from the United Kingdom)

I’m big on keeping the company lean and mean. I’m the only employee,
and I work out of my home. We used to own a retail business where paying
rent, insurance, and twelve employees came ahead of our own paychecks.
Those days are over. Simply put, I don’t like getting paid last. —Jaden Hair
(read more about Jaden in Chapter 2)

My experiences with outsourcing work to remote contractors left me
spending nearly as much time managing the work as it would to actually do
it myself. I’ve yet to find a nice balance of being able to hire someone to
work on a project and making a reasonable profit without spending too
much time on it myself. —Andy Dunn (read more about Andy in Chapter
11)

My motto: Never have a boss and never be a boss. Since age twenty-two,
this has been my situation. I have an accountant, because number crunching
is my biggest weakness. Otherwise, I am a company of one. I can always
vouch for my own work, and my integrity means the world to me. —
Brandy Agerbeck (read more about Brandy in Chapter 7)

As with the pro-outsourcing camp, these quotes are representative of many
others. Lee Williams-Demming mentioned that her importing business formerly
had five employees and hundreds of overseas suppliers. It now has only one
employee and a smaller supplier network. “Trust me,” she wrote in an email,
“we’re better off in every way with a much smaller team.”

Although I know it’s not the best fit for everyone, I tend to fall into the anti-
outsourcing camp in my own business. Instead of sending out projects to
everywhere, I’ve chosen to keep a very small team and do only limited
contracting with outsiders. The first argument for outsourcing is that it allows
you as a business owner to “do more of what you love” while assigning
unwanted tasks to someone else. But outsourcing can create greater problems,
and you can construct your business in a way in which few of these tasks are
actually needed in the first place.

More than once, I’ve heard from colleagues who say they have a fantastic
virtual assistant they’d be happy to recommend to me. Then, weeks or months
later, I hear they’re looking for a new one. “What happened to so-and-so?” I ask.
“Well, they were great … at first. But then the process broke down, balls were
dropped, and we had to part ways.”