Outsourcing scares people.
If you haven’t already, you need to experience this firsthand. Next time you’re in an eclectic bar or social setting, casually seed the discussion with the “O” word. You’ve just pulled the pin from a conversational live-grenade—it’s explosion creating the most magnificent show of biased half-truths and uninformed, misdirected fear you’ve likely seen since the last election. You’ll get rumblings of a crippling recession, tirades of patriotic rhetoric and the obligatory bigoted remark toward a foreign country by someone who doesn’t even have a passport.
There’s also usually someone like me, listening intently with firmly held tongue, knowing there’s just certain people that don’t respond well to economics and logic.
David Walsh is the king of smart systems.
David has spent the last couple years traveling the world while building up a consulting company (that has some huge clients), a publishing company, some killer products, iPhone apps, and more. (P.S. Click here to see my in-depth interview with David & Derek Johanson about their company Dangerous Publishing, about many of their successful digital products, and about smart systems.)
I’m lucky to call him a friend since finally meeting him in person in Bangkok, Thailand in 2010, after following his writings online for some time. We spent a couple months bouncing business ideas off each other at our favorite co-working office and going out with a group of friends to enjoy Bangkok’s nightlife.
This is a guy who makes me jealous with his ability to turn businesses into automated, well-oiled machines.
David has more business deals going than I can comprehend, and enough disposable cash to do pretty much anything he wants, and at the same time he’s got more free time than me or any of my friends! And it all comes down to smart processes and outsourcing. He describes the last few years of research into outsourcing and business processes:
“It was the trial-by-fire I needed to learn two things: ultramobility & outsourcing. I had no choice. It was either spend every waking moment working when I’d rather be seeing the world, or find better ways to get work done.”
Your invitation to the international player’s club
Source Control is where David poured all his expert knowledge, and to this day it is still the best, most informative book I have ever read and probably the most valuable investment you could make in your own business.
Source Control is all about intelligent, systems-driven outsourcing for ambitious entrepreneurs. Cover to cover, the book is filled with actionable strategies and techniques for turning your business processes into systems, taking yourself out of the picture, and creating a bulletproof outsourcing framework that allows you to hand off the low-value, repeatable work to others, while you keep your focus on the most important big issues in your business and come up with new product and service ideas.
Source Control is guaranteed to help you define a scalable, process-driven workflow that produces consistent outcomes with minimal intervention. The attributes required for such a system are:
- Newbie-Friendly. Your system loves the new guy. Your system gets someone up and running immediately, and ensures the results will be as close to the previous person as possible
- User-Agnostic. Your system doesn’t care who’s using it. Your system is unaware of and indifferent to your personality, moods, location, language and level of skill.
- Modular. Your system keeps everyone on a need-to know basis. Not every assistant or new hire will need to handle every aspect of your life or type of task.
- Organized. Your system has obsessive-compulsive disorder. No more digging up old files. No more emailing attachments back and forth. No more chaos. Your system expects everything to live in its proper place and sets rules to ensure they stay there.
- Evolving. Your system learns from its mistakes. Elements of your system should track what’s been accomplished, what’s changed, and who changed it. As new scenarios emerge, your system has a place to hold new rules to simplify for the future.
If that sounds like the kind of business framework you’d like to build, then you need to get your hands on Source Control.
My general thoughts about the guide:
David shows you step by step how to identify and eliminate all the tasks you shouldn’t be wasting time on, identify the ones you don’t want to do, then unpack all the processes you go through to get the job done, so that you can have employees or virtual assistants handle them.
Source Control helps you compare the different types of outsourcing, explains how to screen and hire virtual assistants, and even gives you an idea of the best parts of the world to look for different skills, and the approximate costs you should expect to pay for different types of services. (For finding great, college-educated, English-speaking VAs, I use and recommend my good friend Chris Ducker’s Virtual Staff Finder service in the Philippines.)
Perhaps the most valuable part of the package are the templates for process instructions and task details, and a swipe file of common documents. These resources alone are worth the small investment cost of the ebook.
If you’ve read Tim Ferriss’ 4 Hour Workweek and daydreamed about outsourcing, but don’t have the first idea where to begin, Source Control is the next logical step.
The only negative thing I see about the book is that it spends too much time convincing hesitant readers why they should start outsourcing overseas. I didn’t need any convincing, and I assume if you’re ready to throw down money for this guide you probably don’t either.
Why you should purchase Source Control right this second:
Bottom line: if you’re currently working for yourself, or are at all interested in building your own company, the content packed into Source Control will make you completely rethink how you do things. One of the most important lessons David shares is that working for yourself doesn’t necessarily equate with freedom.
There is no difference between working 60 hours a week in a cubicle or on the beach when it comes to creating the time to actually get out and enjoy your life. The most important take-away is how to build systems so that others can produce the same results you need.
Source Control gives you a blueprint for easily accomplishing much more in less time, so you can actually be the master of your business, and not the other way around. All in all, it’s an invaluable investment for your business.
- Are you ready to start outsourcing intelligently and set up systems so you can effectively hand off tasks to a virtual assistant?
- Ready to start streamlining your business and breaking down the monotonous, time-consuming tasks into processes that you can have someone else complete for you?
- Ready to turn your business into an automated, passive income machine?
Click here to get your very own copy of Source Control now!
Once you gain the knowledge you need about outsourcing, for hiring high-quality, English-speaking virtual assistants (from the Philippines), I use and recommend my good friend Chris Ducker’s Virtual Staff Finder service.
