Outsourcing A Complex Task When You Have Control Issues

I will be the first one to admit that I have had a hard time delegating tasks in my business. Like many people, my need to control the quality at all levels of the business was actually holding me back from expanding my company.

Over the past few years, I have worked hard on my control issues and actually reached a point where a large percentage of the low level work is no longer controlled by me.

Obviously this is a very good thing because it allows me to focus on the bigger picture so I can effectively make sales, do business development and anything else that contributes to overall company growth.

Today I want to share an example of how I was able to outsource a task that I never thought I would be able to delegate.

There are 2 main reasons I believed it wasn’t possible:
1. The task was so complex that I wasn’t sure how to explain all of the steps.
2. I was afraid of things going drastically wrong if that task was not done correctly.

Can you relate?

The task I’m referring to is setting up special offer campaigns. This is basically the equivalent of a “product launch” but at a smaller scale. When we do special offer campaigns with our PLR products, we basically have to setup an entire sales funnel with one or more offers, a download page, buy buttons, etc…

A typical campaign looks like this

Main Offer – A New PLR Product On Sale For A Short Introductory Price

FEimg

Upsell Offer – An additional offer that extends the value of the main offer

PTPimg

Download Page – Custom page(s) that deliver the product(s)

DLpage

The Delegation Issue…

Setting up a campaign like this involves a huge number of steps that would seem very complex and potentially overwhelming to the outside observer.

After years of experience, I could personally build a campaign like this within a few hours. The problem was, I was always doing it from memory and never following any kind of plan or system.

Earlier this year, after reading a book called Work The System, I decided it was time to COMPLETELY document the process with the intention of fully delegating it to a virtual assistant. In my case, the VA was well trained and someone I would be able to trust (just wanted to make that part clear).

The Hard Part

Once I made the decision to document the process, I used my next special offer campaign as my development grounds. Here’s exactly what I did:

– Created a new Pages file (like MS Word on the Mac) to document each step of my process
– Planned a special offer campaign in my notepad
– Literally typed out every step as I executed it
– The resulting document looked like this…

system

The result — I now had literally captured everything that was in my head and put it down in a document. This is the first step to replicating yourself.

BUT… it is not the last step.

Once I had this document, I had to go through it a few times to actually turn some of the chaos in my process into order. I did this by organizing the process into major STEPS.

In my case, the major steps were as follows:

1. Funnel Overview
2. Front End Sales Page
3. Upsell Sales Page
4. JVZoo Front End Buy Button
5. JVZoo Upsell Buy Button
6. JVZoo Sales Funnel
7. DL Guard Entries
8. Download Pages

From there, I was able to create a spreadsheet that easy to read and easy to navigate for my VA. Here is a partial look at the actual spreadsheet we use to systemize our special offer campaigns:

VAsteps

Once this template was created I was able to send a test campaign to my VA. Luckily for us, on the first pass through the system, he was able to setup an entire campaign with almost no help from me (other than a few little tweaks here and there that took maybe 10 minutes of my time).

Now, I simply fill in this spreadsheet template every time we want to run a special offer campaign and my work load has gone from 3-4 hours down to about 20 minutes.

In the end I am freeing up TONS of time that I can now use for higher level, business building tasks.

In Summary…

– You CAN outsource and delegate even the most complex tasks
– You MUST release your need to control and focus on freeing up your time for business growth
– INVEST the time to document the entire process of the task you want to delegate. It may be a bit painful but well worth it
– Test your new systems thoroughly to make sure there are no holes in the process

I hope this gives you a bit of insight and help into a process that you can copy and put to use in your business today. ESPECIALLY if you are a bit of a control freak like me 🙂