How To Outsource Tasks To Add $15K To Your Revenue MONTHLY

One of the questions I get asked most often is, "What the hell is $10 Tasks?" 

People hear me talk about it, I've mentioned it in a few podcasts, and I mention it on LinkedIn every now and then, but people don't fully understand. If that's you and you want to know how to spend 80% less time on administration, automate your time, and double your revenue, then you need to learn $10 Tasks. By the end of this video, you will know how to actually outsource your life to get a 75 times return on your investment.

Another thing people always ask me is, "How do you have so much time to do everything?" I'm like, I am the queen of outsourcing, I'm going to give you my secret, something I didn't think I was ever going to share, but you know what, I'm feeling generous today, let's do it.

Now, before I get into that, if you are new here, my name is Jessica Kimber. I've been a recruiter for over 16 years, and I've placed over 2,000 people into employment worldwide and generated over $20 million in recruitment fees. I own a recruitment agency and have done so for the last four years, I also own a company called Raire, which offers personal branding and sales training programs specifically for recruiters. I've got a wealth of experience in this space, and as a business owner, my goal is always to automate my time. I could spend my entire life doing admin, but I don't allow it, and by the end of this video, you'll know how to get rid of the junk so you can focus on revenue-generating tasks only.

Now, the concept of $10 Tasks is actually something I've followed for around 3 to 4 years now, and the idea behind it is that if it can be outsourced overseas for $10, which is probably what you would pay an outsourced worker for an administration-based task, you do not need to be doing it. Think about it right, let's just say I spend 20 hours a week doing $10 tasks or admin and invoicing and market mapping and retrieving contact details, so all those types of basic admin tasks, that's 50% of my week spent on not making any money. I could pay someone $200 to do that 20 hours' time, $10 an hour. I could then make another placement in that time, which gives me $15,000 on average, let's say. When I say this can help you generate 75 times your return on investment, that's where that number comes from. If you're spending 200 bucks a week to get 15 grand back, it's an absolute no-brainer, and this is something I've mastered over the years. I used to have a bit of a control freak problem and hated delegating, but now I'm like, "It's got to go, get rid of it, I'm not doing it because you don't have to."

Here's how it works. 

Firstly, I want to look at all of the tasks you do every single day and write it down. So that includes vetting job applications, phone screening candidates, interviewing candidates, sourcing via LinkedIn or Seek, and sending emails, reverse marketing, taking references, compliance, rejecting candidates, scheduling interviews, preparing candidates for interviews, obtaining interview feedback, taking in job briefs, negotiating on salaries, writing job ads, posting job ads, talent pooling, formatting resumes, market mapping, populating your database or coding your database, BD calls, client meetings, sending terms of business, networking events, and even invoicing clients. There is a lot we do as recruiters, in fact, probably 90% of that doesn't make you any money.

Here is what you are going to do. 

Get a pen and paper and start jotting down, everything I've just mentioned. 

Go back to the above key points if you need to in terms of what we do with our activity as recruiters, and I want you to write down how much of your time you spend per week on these activities. 

So next to each activity, let's just take "writing job ads" for example, you might write two hours or "taking references" it might be 30 minutes, it might be "BD calls 4 hours" for example, or you know, "Talent pooling or coding the database three hours." I want you to get an exact gauge of how you spend your week. Now, I know all weeks are different, so just do it to the best of your ability. And then I want you to actually take a look at exactly what you've written and see where you're spending the most time.

Once you have completed that task, I want you to then write next to it a header that says, "Does this activity generate revenue?" and then I want you to write yes or no next to each and every one. And as a hint, most of them are going to be no. Once you've done that, I want you to do another header and write, "Is there a process in place for this?" Now, a lot of recruiters will have their knowledge up here, so if you don't have a process in place, my suggestion is to get on ChatGPT, write down the dot points of what you do end to end, so how you manage each activity end to end in dot points, and then ask ChatGPT to write you a process. There you have it, there's your process guide that you can send to somebody else to teach them.

Then I want you to do another header that says, "Can a VA do this?"

So there is going to be specific tasks that you probably won't get a VA to do. So for example, even if you spend 10 hours a week on Business Development calls, you probably wouldn't want a VA to do that anyway because that's a direct revenue-generating activity. However, if it's formatting resumes, of course, a VA can do that. Get your process guide together, give them a template, show them how to do that, and outsource that. You will find a VA is capable of doing 70 to 80% of our roles as I promise you on this.

And yes, it takes a little bit of training, and a tip with hiring VAs is to interview them as if you were interviewing any other staff member. That's something which I've done, has worked really well for me. I actually went through three, four, maybe five VA companies in the last three or four years for different types of VAs, and I actually never got high-quality talent. So what I started doing is treating it like a recruitment activity, and actually, I just headhunted people on LinkedIn, sent them a message, set up a Zoom, interviewed them as if I would a full-time employee, and then that was it, offered them the job if they were interested.

Paying a VA

Something to note is when you're paying a VA, if you're hiring them full-time permanently, it's illegal from Australia if you don't have an employer of record between you and them. So you need to hire an external company, an employer of record, to payroll them legally. So what will happen is the worker will have a contract with the employer of record, and then the employer of record has a contract with you, so they pay the worker, you pay them. It's kind of like a contract basis, but so what that means is that the worker gets everything that they're entitled to in terms of like sick leave, pay in some cases, like health insurance in some countries. But it just makes sure that it's all legal.

If you are paying somebody on a contract basis, there is a platform called Upwork that you can use. You can find VAs on Upwork, but you can also just set them up under payroll on Upwork as well. You just create a dummy job and you engage them. They are responsible for their taxes that way, but at least there's that way it all goes through Upwork and it's not you directly employing somebody from Australia because you could get in trouble for that.

So I'm definitely no lawyer, this is just to my knowledge, in my experience what I found out if you are looking to pay somebody legally. Obviously, look for an employer of record initially, and just do a quick Google search if you know how to legally pay the temp workers, there are all sorts of solutions and companies out there who can do that for you.

Training your VA

Train your VAs as if they're full-time staff. I actually have daily catch-ups for 15 minutes with my VA. Treat your VAs and your offshore workers like staff. I also see recruitment agencies treat them like crap, to be honest, and you know, have no respect. They're overseas, they just expect so much from them, but they don't really give any training. 

That's not what it's about. Even if they're a temp worker, you onboard them and you invest your time in them as if they were an onshore administrator. Number one, that's how you're going to get the best out of them, and number two, that's how you're going to actually make them want to do a good job because you're giving your effort to them as well. There are so many amazing VAs out there and they will work really, really hard for you, but you need to do your part as well. 

Monitoring your VA’s performance 

The other point to note is something I do with my virtual assistants (VAs): I set KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). My operations manager is actually located overseas, and she helps me with the recruitment of remote VAs. Because she lives in the Philippines, she said to me that quite often, they'll accept jobs from overseas, like in Australia, and then they'll just sleep through the time zone, doing like two hours of work per day. To avoid that and to avoid any slacking, I confirm hours. I work out what KPIs are achievable within this time frame.

To give you an example, I've got a VA that codes my database. I know that he can add 150 contacts per day, including contact details and coding them, and I know that takes him eight hours. So I said to him, "Every single day, I don't care if it takes you 7.2 or 8.3 hours. I don't care how many hours it takes you. You're doing 150 per day, and you're getting paid for 8 hours per day. If you do it quicker than that, then knock yourself out, but that's the expectation and this is the outcome."

You can do that with all sorts of tasks as well, like setting SLAs (Service Level Agreements) around turnaround times. For instance, "If I send you a resume, I want that formatted within one hour," or "If I send you a job advert to create, I want that posted within a three-hour time window." So from day one, set expectations during that training phase and ensure they're crystal clear on what they need to do, how they're going to be tracked, and how you're going to track them and stay on top of them and monitor that as well.

It is simpler than you think to outsource your $10 tasks. Finding VAs is also very easy because a lot of them will respond to you on LinkedIn, and a lot of them will work for a dollar an hour more. Fun fact: pay a bit more, and you'll get the one that you want.

As you may know, I run training programs for Recruiters globally. If you are interested in working with me, submit an enquiry via the “Contact” page and I will be in touch.