Read the different roles Master Digital Coach Siddharth Rajsekar recommends outsourcing to freelancers to build and grow a super profitable coaching business.
Like most talented entrepreneurs, I have a cherished dream. I want a hundred thousand people to live a life of freedom by using the power of the internet. I was all charged up. I wanted to do it all.
At first, I thought I was the only person who could do all the work efficiently; I wanted control over everything. Some of you may be like one man or one woman army, trying to do everything yourself. It's good to start like that but not so good to scale because you will burn out. As an entrepreneur or startup business, you are likely a hard-working, never-give-up kind of person who wants every facet of your business to be perfect. Because of those qualities, we tend to take on more than we can handle. However, there will come a time when business is booming, built and it’s time to think about outsourcing.
My hook is how to build a business without any office or employees; I started that way. I did a business without any office, and I continue to just work from my home office: no real estate and stuff like that. And I implemented all the things myself first in the first phase.
Gradually I started adding more members to my team. Right now, I only have a few people on the payroll in my company. At the same time, I wanted my business to grow, and to do that; I had to let go and start delegating. Letting go paid off for me.
The way I see it is when it comes to growing a business, you can spend more time or you can spend more money. As you're creating money. Initially, when you're starting you may need to spend more time doing all the things manually, but as you're making money, you need to start reinvesting it back into methods that can save you time.
I came to realize that delegating specific tasks to subject-matter experts was the best tactical solution. I could reduce my overhead expenses while successfully scaling up.
I want to share the top 10 roles that I have in my team that are helping me grow as a digital coach:
General Manager Operations: The most important role for me is my general manager of operations. Now, this is someone who's full-time in my company and does what I used to be doing when I started my business. The role of the general manager is to ensure he takes care of at least 50% to 60% of the workload. Some of his roles are to ensure that all my emails are answered before 9:00 PM every night, taking care of refunds and course access levels as well as managing the affiliate system
Content Management: On my Facebook fan page, I have a lot of people who view and comment on posts that are posted every few hours. The best part is I'm not doing those posts. I have a dedicated resource that I've delegated this work to who posts multiple times in a day in terms of all the content and communication, including email communication. I have a full-time community manager on my team who replies to all the emails that come in. Only the ones that they cannot answer come into my mailbox, and then I answer that. So I've delegated the online communication piece; that’s why it gives so much more freedom. Without delegation, the sad truth is that we stall the growth of our companies because there is only so much time, energy, and creative focus we can provide as an individual. By outsourcing certain tasks to others, we open up more of our own resources to focus on generating income.
Community Management: You can also delegate your community management if you're building your community like I have a community manager who looks into all the internal communication that's coming from the community. I have two people in my team who are dedicated to external communication, a person who cleans up all the comments on my facebook fan page and who replies to all the comments. Since I'm spending a lot of money on ads, there's a lot of spam comments also that happen and I need to have somebody dedicated to just cleaning up those comments. and then have an external community manager who actually goes and responds to all my Trustpilot reviews.
Video editing: The next area that you can outsource is video editing. I don't need to do it all the time, but whenever I need to create a trailer video, applicator, new reel, I have an external video editor that does the job. Since the work load varies every month, I find it best to work with a freelancer and pay them based on what work is there for that month.
Accounting: I have an outsourced finance manager, more like an outsourced CFO who does all my financial data. I have some bit of automation in my accounting systems in terms of finances, but I also have a dedicated person who looks into my entire auditing. So it's a system where by the third or fourth of every month I pull out all the reports and send it out to her all my statements and by the 10th of the month, I get the GST amount that I need to pay by the 20th of every month as the GST is paid on time and all my income tax, everything. It’s been like a cycle for the last 24 months and I've delegated that particular task. I have delegated even the invoicing GST. I get so many customers who buy my products on a monthly basis so all of that has been set into a process.
Advertising: Another area that you can outsource is your advertising. I used to be running my Facebook ads. Now I've given it out to an ad agency; that entire headache is taken out of my mindshare and that is giving me that space to do other things, to think about the next things and to build a new vision for my community and so on. Right now, I have Facebook and Google ads running and different teams running those ads for me. Previously, I used to run these ads myself, and now I have a team that does it so that the complete pain area has been taken away from my life.
I have a Google ad expert, and their role is very clear; to deliver the best cost per lead and best cost per acquisition. Everything is outsourced. When they need to, they'll give me pointers on campaign ideas and stuff. So everything's outsourced.
Understand the underlying benefits of outsourcing, like what to outsource, and how to maximize your team’s efforts. Outsourcing is a tactical solution to reduce your company’s overhead expenses.
Social media: Entrepreneurs utilize social media to reach new customers while showcasing their products or services. But creating posts and building a loyal following takes time. Fortunately, outsourcing your social media efforts is one of the cheapest and easiest tasks to delegate to a reputable virtual assistant or firm.
The individual you hire for the job should be able to schedule and create posts, but more importantly, he or she should make sure they dedicate time to responding to comments and interacting with your followers. Since social media does not require technical knowledge, it is one of the cheapest tasks for you to outsource and the easiest to find quality talent.
Community Activity Management: The other area that you can outsource besides this is for your community management. So I have a community manager right now who is more like a facilitator of all the leaders of my community, just to ensure that all our community-based activities, initiatives are running on time. We have meet ups happening every single day, 365 days a year and for that, I needed to have one person who can look at those who's ensuring that the campaign has followed. There's no self-promotion. Everyone is following the code of honor that we have adopted in the community, someone who's keeping an eye on all that's happening in the internal community, so like more of a community manager role.
As you're building your business you can add on people to fill these roles: General manager, content manager, and internal community manager can be outsourced or even project-based finance manager.
We have outsourced content writer, outsourced Facebook ads, outsourced Google ads, outsourced PR, outsourced web team. So when you are able to create a structure like this, it'll give you more freedom to build your business. I'm working with some amazing people who are doing work for me.
Creating content remains a challenge for many entrepreneurs as it should engage your readers, and publicize your product. Best of all is to be ranked in Google. Fortunately, when partnering with a competent content marketing agency, they create content that evokes emotion and creates a buzz around your product or service.
Read more about how to build a super efficient freelance team in Siddharth Rajsekar's Ultimate Guide.
Siddharth Rajsekar is the founder of India's largest digital coaching community, the Internet Lifestyle Hub and is the Author of the international bestseller, You Can Coach.
Having run an agency with 35 employees previously, Siddharth decided he was going to leverage the power of freelancers for his digital coaching business from Day 1 and has therefore, been super profitable from the beginning. Siddharth outlines all the different roles he has for freelancers in his business currently and even recommends A “Digital One-Stop-Shop” called DigitalMarket.com, that takes care of all his digital needs including his website, videos and blogs.
