Conrad Ruiz is the founder of Well Aware, a time management and operations consultancy that helps founders and tech teams buy their time back through outsourcing. In this episode, we talk about how to actually start outsourcing when you have never done it before, and why most founders get the math wrong.
Start with a time audit, not an ideation list
Do not sit down and brainstorm what you could outsource. Write down what you actually do in a week, then look at the list. The best candidates for outsourcing are the tasks that keep appearing on it. Conrad walks through how to document them with a Loom video and hand them off to a virtual assistant without spending three weeks on an SOP.
70% is a passing grade, not a failure
Founders burn out of outsourcing because they expect new hires to work the way they do on day one. Conrad accepts 70% quality on the first go. If quality improves from there, the relationship works. Perfection as the bar is how you end up with a very costly outsourcing experience and nobody to delegate to.
Know the math before you hire
Conrad walks through the time-for-cash trade: if your hourly rate is $100 and you can hand a task to someone else for $10 an hour, outsourcing is a $90-per-hour trade in your favor. The founders who cannot make themselves do it are usually the ones who have not calculated what their own time is worth, and so they cannot see what they are giving up by doing the task themselves.
Conrad also walks through his TRACK framework: time, relationships, actions, commitments and knowledge management. It is the set of boxes a virtual assistant can actually own.
Read the transcript
Conrad: Hi, I'm Conrad Ruiz. I'm the founder of Well Aware and I'm gonna be on the Messy Growth Show to talk to you about how to grow your business without spending more hours.
Christian: Welcome to the Messy Growth Show, the podcast that dives deeply into the heart of B2B growth stories. We are here to unmask the raw, the real, and the often messy road to success, because let's face it, growth isn't always neat and tidy. Join your hosts Soren and myself, Christian, as we sit down with top leaders mining for proven strategies to accelerate your business. Welcome to the Messy Growth Show. Your roadmap to success starts here. Conrad, it's an absolute pleasure having you here and I'm excited to have you on the show because we will be talking about one of my absolute favorite themes, scaling your business through outsourcing. So Well Aware. What is all that about? Let me hear.
Conrad: First off, Christian & Soren. Thank you guys for inviting me to be a part of the show. I'm really grateful. Yeah, Well Aware. I set out to build a time management company and I thought that I for the most part, I was going to really just connect with people around what they were doing with their time and just be able to support them in the conversations that I felt that they needed to have around how to make more use of it. That's led into an entire realm of conversation and work around, operations. In a nutshell, everything from. How do you get through the logistics of your day to how do you set up the systems that help you go about doing that? And to a lot of our discussion today, we're gonna talk about how people and outsourcing get involved in that sort of thought processing and decision making behind when you've got a bunch of things to do and not enough time to do it, what do you do? So yeah, really excited to be here and can't wait to get started.
Christian: Sweet. It's, it is definitely a pain that I encounter with pretty much all of our clients, which is like, I just don't have enough time for this. You know, it's capping their growth. So I definitely see the pain. So, I'm curious on, you know, what, if you wanna start outsourcing, if you want to grow your business faster and in a more intelligent way, what, where should you, what should you outsource? Why should you start?
Conrad: Yeah, so I think it's important to recognize what you're currently doing. I think that the best way to start outsourcing is to just run an audit on your time initially, and to get a sense of what are all the different things that you're doing. I think it helps to not sit down and try to just ideate on some checklist of random things that you try to do throughout the day. I would really sit down and go, what am I actually doing throughout the day? And try to understand the nature of those jobs. Try to imagine yourself, and this is one of the first challenges that people get through, is they have a hard time imagining themselves outsourcing an actual task. They've never, they've maybe never done it before or they've never seen it done before. And so this idea that someone else can do something exactly the way they do it perfectly, if not better, it seems strange. So once you've put together your audit list of things that you need to do, you need to identify, you know what's the sort of standard role or responsibility behind this particular task or set of tasks. And it could just be one individual thing. I think a lot of folks try to get started by saying, I need a person who could do it all. I need someone to completely replace me. I'm like, no, you just need someone to take care of one simple function. It could be as simple as, you know, data entry that you perform on the regular. Maybe you're constantly adding data into your CRM system. You have a particular workflow for that. Okay, cool. I, if you don't have a particular workflow, like write down what you would do if you had the time. Because then we get into this conversation about what things you don't get to because you don't have the time in the first place. And so this becomes this like, I'm kind of treating around this like methodology, right, of like, N understand the operation. Decide, like imagine yourself being a third person stepping into your world and taking on that operation for you. What would they need to know in order to do it the way that you do it? And then from there, it could be a sim, like the practical side to that is just say, all right, I've got this task that I do. I answer these particular emails that are notifications from this tool. Every time I get the notification, this is what I do. Cool. That's the standard operating procedure. It's very simple. All I had to do to explain that to someone was pop up my, you know, pop up a loom video, say like talking out loud, thinking out loud here. This is what I did. I went into my email, I clicked on these things, I responded this way. These are all the edge cases that I have to deal with. There's only like X amount of them. It's not complicated. It's not like the core nature of my work that requires like all of my experience and background and skillset. You can do it if you just learned and then you're done. And then you can just go find someone. Like there are various marketplaces that you can go to, five or for, you know, some of the more fractional base work. But even, you know, you can go to these special marketplaces designed to give you virtual assistance who tend to be very flexible and you can literally request their specific skills, if your, if your job entails a little bit more. A little bit more experience in particular arenas. I can talk about that through an example I just went through today with a client who just onboarded a virtual assistant who I helped them find. And yeah, that's then you just go through that onboarding process like, Hey, welcome to I world. Here's everything you need access to. Here's how I can expect to pay you, sustain you. If we can get into that conversation around like, how do you recognize the sort of the time versus money, sweat, trade, outsourcing and you're good. Like that's kind of the kit and caboodle.
Christian: Why aren't everybody doing this? I picked up on you saying, you know, this is like, can somebody do this just as perfect as me? I don't need somebody doing it. Like a hundred percent perfect. Just ship it right. And we'll get it 80, 90% good. Great. And then that's fine. But is this mindset around for founders who, Did everything themselves. They built a company from scratch. They did the Facebook post, they wrote all the emails, they answered all the customer support requests. They probably scoped out the entire product roadmap or whatever kind of company it is. And then now they need to have somebody else doing it. And that is just like a. Big step for them. Right? So I'm just curious if we are setting ourselves up for failure by having that mindset around perfection.
Conrad: Oh, I mean it, I would say you're setting yourself up for a very costly outsourcing experience. And yeah, you're going to be disappointed because very few people are gonna do something as good as you, if not better on the first try. It may take people a while. I've had plenty of virtual assistants that I've worked with. It's like, you get started with them and I'm like, I don't know how I feel about this. And then you give them some time and they figure it out. Like they're not, they're not clones of you. They didn't just wa wake up and go like, I know everything Conrad knows and I'm ready to go. It's like, no, they just need some time and experience and certainly some guidance and it'll be a little bit back and forth. Perfection is one of the bigger issues beyond that. And to your point, Christian, I think I would even go so far as to accept 70% of the quality of work, at least on the first go around. Like, I would like to see improvements from there. That 70% is a passing grade and it shows me that you're, you know, barring takes time to learn just about anything. You know, you get, you get enough of the idea that I could, if I could see modular improvement, I'll be okay. But honestly the biggest problem I see when it comes to outsourcing is the literal time itself it takes to do that.
Christian: Yeah, that's a good point. It takes time to document your processes, like the standard operating procedures or playbooks or whatever you call 'em.
Conrad: If you're too busy.
Christian: To take longer time documenting than doing it yourself. Right. And then it's like, hell, I'll just do it. And I've done that like millions of times for sure.
Soren: I mean.
Conrad: Well, you're trying to meet deadlines, right?
Soren: It's, to me, it's, I have been through this process as well where I think what I, where you look at things in bulk, right? So like you said, you are not necessarily looking for somebody to. Handle all your emails or all your support tickets, or all your responses on, or outreach via your website chat feature or whatever the case might be. But once you start digging into it, you can segment it and you can say, all right, this part of support tickets or this part of outreach on the website, they could handle. Before you start digging into the nitty radio of it, you won't see that. You will just look at it as a totality and say, I can't outsource that.
Conrad: Which is true like logically.
Soren: You don't get started. And yes, it is just like having kids when they come out. They're not doing like you want them to do and maybe they never will. But they are teachable and they're just as wise as you in the end. So give it time and do invest the time in passing on your skills because that's also crucial, right? I don't have the, but then if we don't, we will never scale. And I think.
Christian: They are great for, great child labor later on. So no, that's.
Soren: Yeah.
Christian: Joking.
Soren: Let's have discussion on.
Conrad: It's definitely a call to, like, outsourcing is a, is a call to action. That implies thinking in the long term or even in the medium to long term, but, For a number of people, that can be really hard because again, the initial premise of why you probably want to outsource, or I would say the higher your need to outsource, paradoxically, the more difficult it is. Because if you are so busy just sustaining the business that you run by yourself or at the current team or whatever design that you have, then that alone is going to make it very difficult for you. You actually may have to have a harder conversation around reducing the capacity. Of what you need to sustain, and that might mean turning away dollars that you've already accepted. So you have to figure out where your cash flow is in order to make that decision, and then you have to come to terms with the fact that your cash flow's gonna drop even more once you go ahead and proceed with this process of having someone. Who's an outsourced res, who's an outsourced, person in your world now take responsibilities for you. All of that has to come full circle within your brain as like, okay, that's fine, given the fact that all of that's being done to increase your time flow dramatically. Like, it's another thing entirely to say that like, okay, if my cashflow would be cut in half, but I were to buy all of my time back, I've ha I'm living in pure profit land. I can do literally whatever I want. Okay, cool. Let me just go repeat what I did. Let me just go rebuild all this new time I have. I'm just gonna re like, scale out the business in the exact same way that I just did it. Cool. I have all of that cash flow back, like it's put numbers to it. Let's say you're able to produce $10,000 a month on your own just by working to the bone. Fantastic if you cut that in half, but all of that stuff was outsourced now, and you're free to make 10 grand again using all of your time and resources. Boom, you have a 5K profit margin per month just based on your ability to build all the business and then out remove yourself from it. Not bad.
Christian: Nope. Nope. That's good. So, how do you, like, you talked about, you went through this process with a client. Can you like, take us through the journey of how you do this?
Conrad: Sure. So, in this case, my client works in the agency space, for design and in particular, their biggest stress was I've got too much work to do and I can't service everybody. And in particular, he was concerned about that as well as like sales and marketing. So he was on one end, he was like, I have a service delivery capacity issue, but I also have a sales and marketing issue. Like I just don't have the time to do it all. Like clearly you don't have the time to do it all right, now you're stuck at service delivery capacity. So let's alleviate that. There are other designers in this world. He knows that I know that. Let's find someone good. So. Based on looking at his operations, we recognized how he would go about fitting in new relationships, new outsource relationships, to be able to take on the client work. So we had a very clear sense of how the operation would sustain if someone was there. They just needed to be trained. Fantastic. We in particular, I love outsourcing through the Philippines. Great culture, very affordable. And the hours tend to work for people given folks tend to work in the morning. And that's exactly where my client works. So, We went on to online jobs.ph. Great resource for literally anybody to go on right now and just start searching for virtual assistance in that particular capacity in the space of design. So we found someone, they had, we had, I think it was 10 different folks that we looked into. We sent out calendar invites for each of them to perform a first round interview call. Seven of them made it like to the actual seven of them actually scheduled time on the calendar. Five of them actually made it. Three of them were actually worthwhile continuing with. Of those three, we selected one, and now they're gonna start working tomorrow. We went through all of the. Onboarding.
Christian: Are you testing these people? Because that's at least my experience when I've, when I've been looking for people on Upwork and similar platforms, I get flooded, like you said, 10 here, but I would get 50, 100, 200 people applying.
Conrad: I will preface that when I, forgive me, I did skip a step, which was when I put out the job application on behalf of my client on online jobs pH, there were a hundred messages in my inbox. Now, in the world of design for this particular, the short answer to your question Christian, is like, it can depend like, what am I testing for? What am I looking for in a job application? But essentially for this design work we're looking at, you know, what's someone's portfolio? Are they able to communicate, you know, succinctly and well on their, on their actual job, a application itself? Or are they just copying and pasting, you know, the same, verbiage that they probably use for everybody else? And what's cool is like systems, like online jobs can actually tell you like, here's how many, applications this other, this person has applied for. And so you can get a sense of whether or not they're just spamming for jobs or if they're actually genuinely showing interest in yours. So the real case at the end of the day for, you know, can I, can I trust this person? Can I vet them? Just do a sample case work. Give them a sample of what it is that you're going to have them do, even if it's the literal work itself. Just find some way to kind of isolate and set up an experiment for just a small portion of that work. Nothing too crazy, something that you're willing to pay these people for. But at the same time, like if this qu, if this sample works for them and it works for you, then you could only imagine that, all right, let's just expand that into, you know, a 10, 20, 30, 40 hour work. Weak kind of scenario in terms of operational need. And there you have it. Like that's your test case. They all of that flies board. All of that works well, and then you can go ahead and proceed to say, all right, I think this, I think this could be a working relationship. I think it could bring you on.
Christian: Okay. My own way of dealing with the, with the flood of messages is to hide a question in the middle of my, job description where I'm asking some completely random question. And if they don't answer that question, I just discard them.
Conrad: Yep. That's a.
Christian: Because then they weren't, They weren't, looking at the details of what I actually asked for, and then bye.
Conrad: Yeah. This is the classic, caption move, you know, are you a robot?
Christian: Exactly Justin, like, you know, what's the capital of health of Finland or.
Conrad: Point all the squares that are fire hydrants? Thank you. No, I get it. Like, what's your favorite fruit? It's like, if they don't tell you anything about that, then yeah.
Christian: No. No. Okay. And then what about the, like, daily management of these? I mean, in, we use base camp for like, you know, classic, dealing with to-dos and that kind of stuff. And we use Slack on top of that and things can get bit messy, you know? How do you deal with, like, maybe you have more than just one freelancer, if you really wanna scale the team.
Conrad: Yeah. Slack is a great way to put everyone on the same communication path. The daily standard operation for everyone, including myself, is, what's my start of day report, what's my end of day report? Just a quick glance into, you know, what are the expectations of your day and how did you finish off? What's still left to be done tomorrow? Depending on how your tasks are set up and what you're assigning to these outsourced relationships, Basecamp is one suggestion. I have teams who use Asana notion, click up like you name it. In my world, I get into all of the different project management tools and they all form their own function. Like they all, they all, you know, support pretty much the same things, just in their own particular way. And yeah, as long as everyone's clear on what the, what's the sort of, I call it the meta standard operating procedure. Like how do you even use the tools that we use, to manage those things? And that's a training in and of itself, depending on a user's, background. That's the expectation you set. This is what I look for you from click up is what I look for you from Slack. This is what I look for you from email. Okay, great. As long as you're committing to those expectations and I'm being reasonable about the time it takes just to communicate cause it's part of the job to be done, then we're all good to go.
Christian: No, I spotted it in a standard operation procedure not so long time ago, which was it was for SDR sales reps, and it was like, you know, Download the Slack app. Don't just use the browser because then you'll got not get the notifications And, I was like, okay, that's maybe a bit overexplaining it. But then we actually had the same case internally like a couple of days later when. That was like the case that she didn't get a message because she was just using the browser. I was like, holy shit. Like maybe we need to get to that level in our playbooks and like, you know, install Slack and also do it on your phone and whatever. Put in your profile photo, put in your phone number in case we need to contact you in case of some emergency and just like pinpoint it down to a crazy level.
Conrad: It the, these particular layers of like operation, they tie down to communication management. And it's an entire study in and of itself. Like outside of whatever tasks you're gonna have someone do for work. Like there's an entire protocol around how should we communicate and be able to communicate across all different sets of expectations. I have an entire workflow where, because of my clients, and the variety that I have of them, I tell my team, like, you have a browser profile. It's in very ma. In very many cases you may be logging in to various different accounts and various different, you have various different portals, if you will, for each client. I want you to reflect that in your literal browser profiles, like create multiple profiles and color code them and organize them. Like and I literally show them. I like, again, put that loom video in front of 'em. Like this is literally how I organize 10 different people that I work with without going insane because I'm not just doing it all from one browser space. And that it's part of giving this person a sense of like, how do you even organize yourself given the complexity of work that you may be in front of? And again, you have to think about it this way. It's your benefit that they're as organized as humanly possible. Give them that training. It'll make them better at the end of the day. And, you know, it'll relieve you of this sense of war of concern that things are falling through the cracks. That's a really interesting tip. I hadn't thought about the browser profiles. So if we look at, now you mentioned the, A key resource in a, in an agency, a design agency. So which type of clients do you help out? I primarily operate in the tech space, so I'll tend to interact a lot with tech startups, SaaS founders. I'll have, my time with different types of agencies that all operate digitally and remotely, for the nature of their work. Me being able to supply them with a virtual assistant is, you know, pretty standard. Like I have an idea of everything that they do across their desktop screen, which is 90% of their work. And so that entire premise is what I can help them organize because I know exactly what I can expect from looking in front of a computer screen and just share with them what's my sense of experience around being able to navigate through this tool.
Soren: In the tech space, for example, what are the typical things you help them set up? Where do they start in terms of outsourcing?
Conrad: Oftentimes we'll get into a couple of various, like high level things. I like to think of five different types of management. In particular, I call it the track. So it's time, relationships, actions, commitments, and knowledge. And on the time side in specific, we're talking about. All of the basic calendar management, time management, like putting things onto your calendar and organizing yourself according to that. That is something that, you know, if you're someone who's doing travel logistics, if you're someone who just needs to like go through your day and be like, all right, this is everything that happened today here, all the things I need to document. So a lot of time management is really documentation management and what I like to call awareness management. Like actually documenting what it is the hell that you've been doing and what you now need to do. Relationship management. You can get into all manners of CRMs. You can get into all manners of social media. Staying in touch with relationships, checking in with them, checking back. I have a whole workflow for managing introductions, to how to help people like stay in touch with their network and kind of support them that way. Action management is your task management systems. Everything from, whatever project management software or task management software that you're using to. All the different tasks you have to document. What's your SOP for that? How do you go about, you know, assigning yourself time to go ahead and do those tasks? Commitment management is your objectives, your goals, your OKRs, everything that you're trying to get accomplished. Like what does it mean to process all the things that you're doing across time, relationships, actions, and then projecting that across like the actual goals that you're committed to. Like where does that data as it's being performed, update your systems for how are you ultimately doing based on what you're trying to get accomplished. And then knowledge management is just like everything that you've come to learn throughout your space, all the different tools and resources and guides. Where does all that get stored? Like what's your library of information? Of all the things that you've been creating, accessing, utilizing, and how do you go about organizing all that? Like where's, what's your file management process, if you will. And so that's the track. Stay on track, but take your time.
Christian: Fair enough. It's, I mean, when you mentioned like, you know, travel management and I was just like jumping into that was in, you know, private travel. I was like, God, we spent like two weeks on that shit. You know? I was like looking at a bunch of like bunch, like 40 different hotels, airline connections, whatever. I was like, I could have spent that time at. Bit more intelligent just by giving it, you know, giving the scope to somebody else and then I could focus on my business instead of that. And so that was, but historically that's been kind of tasks that have been, you know, if you had a personal assistant, you were like a big hotshot, c e o and a big company, and you would have a personal assistant taking care of all these things. But.
Conrad: That's changed. I.
Christian: Things have changed now.
Conrad: You don't have to drive your own car anymore. You can get an Uber like, and people are like, oh, Uber's expensive. I'm like, owning a car is expensive. Like. You make that I *know* people who don't own their own car, they just uber everywhere. And if you look at the cost on a, on a, on a, on a certain basis, it's like it's more effective than even leasing a car for that matter. Wow. So it's interesting to sort of see how that math works out. Like at the end of the day, there is, this is outsourcing in and of itself, much like anything else in your time and world. It's an opportunity cost game. You need to recognize where your time flow is and where your cash flow is. You need to recognize what do you need more of right now? And that's constantly what we're doing. We're concentrating time for cash and back at it again. We're trying to constantly leverage higher values on each side. So, You have to know where your numbers are at. I think that's something you can't, until you get to that point, you actually can't outsource it. But then I'm lying cuz I go to my bookkeeper, I'd be like, Hey Heather, I really need your help, like, doing the math real quick. Like, it's literally what I'm doing tomorrow. So you actually can't outsource that too.
Christian: I felt completely in love with this space when I read the four hour work week, like, I don't know, 15 years ago or whatever it was when it came out, and I was just like, this guy is just outsourcing all his customer support tickets and sitting on, I don't know, Hawaii or whatever, going to Argentina, dancing tango, whatever. I was like, fuck, this. Sounds awesome. Yeah, exactly. So then remember later on I would. I would always make the calculation in my head, can I, my hourly rate is let's just, you know, say a hundred dollars, whatever on average, or a thousand dollars, whatever. I can outsource it to somebody else that I can pay less than that rate, and then I can do something more intelligent, that will pay more. I would do that any day and I would instruct our entire team to do the same. Like, look at your task. Is this a task that. It will take you a bunch of time and it will, you can outsource it for five, $10 per hour. Just do it. You don't have to ask. Just do it.
Conrad: You don't have to ask, just do it. This is, it's a really interesting mindset to get into, right? We talked about it from the very beginning. As a business owner, you have to adopt this mindset where you trade your money and resources for time back, and you do that by hiring smart people to get stuff done for you operationally that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do as well. Or with the given time to tell your employees the same thing is. Pretty interesting. It comes into this weird question of like, what are we really doing? It's like, well, we're all trading our time for resources in a way so that we can then make the time to do what we really wanna do.
Christian: Oh.
Conrad: Okay.
Christian: Efficient team that I've ever worked with.
Conrad: Yeah.
Christian: Because they could really spend it on the high value tasks instead of like, you know, stupid stuff like putting subtitles on a video after doing a podcast or whatever. Right. It was like, There's some guy somewhere that can do that for $5, and I bet he's gonna be much better at it than we are. And then we can, you know, look at how can we optimize our million dollar ad budget instead? So.
Soren: Just as an add-on to the freeing up your own time, I mean, building a business is really. Building an asset, right? And eventually you need to work yourself of a job. The business cannot be dependent on you eventually. So really the mindset should be that in the end you have outsourced everything. You have delegated or outsourced everything. And that I think is a very interesting, Mindset to work towards, because then the journey starts now. Then we just take it one step at a time and outsource everything.
Christian: Then you're like a business owner instead of just being an employee in your own company. Right. So like you can take yourself out of the equation at some point. That's my, that's my end game. You know, and just being, having many different companies and just being like, okay, let's, let me just go in without completely sabotaging. Let's see what's going on in here. Can I do, can I give some inputs? If not, okay. I'll stay away. Yeah, that's fine. Run with it.
Soren: That's obviously a journey. It's not. In 12 months from now, or 18 months from now. But.
Christian: Maybe with Conrads help.
Soren: To eventually delegate everything. Then because the idea also about outsourcing as much as possible and have as a few, as a, as few tasks, different kinds of tasks as possible. Cuz there is this switching cost, right? We're doing one thing now and then we switch to something else and. By definition we lose a certain percentage by switching of our time every day by switching from one task to another. Cuz we've gotta dive in deep mentally into this new task. We've gotta open up the browsers, find the files, and you know, completely switch mindset to another task. And the fewer times we can do that during a day, the more efficient we can.
Conrad: I think it helps to think of it like, You can walk into a room that's blank that has nothing else going on. And this is sort of the mindset I try to share with people. It's like, it's like pure compartmentalization. You're in a, you're in an empty room and there's just a bunch of boxes, right? And each of those boxes are labeled. Feel free to prioritize the boxes. You kind of have some context as to what they mean to you. But when you go ahead and you open up that box, right, there's a bunch of things that could be in there and. Part of what's the nature of your work whenever you're operating inside that box is you're gonna pull that stuff out. You're gonna, you know, mess with it, manipulate it, change it, add to it, subtract from it, whatever the case may be. But then what are you gonna do when you need to go onto the next box? You're gonna leave that whole box, just kind of, you know, just. Out there, just kind of chaotic, like all the stuff that you just took out, you're gonna like not put it back in. Like, are you gonna just leave it there? Or worst case, are you just gonna sit there and just be like, oh man, all these boxes are important to me. I'm gonna go ahead and open up all these boxes, just dump out the stuff in front of everything and just have this huge pile of things that are all there in front of me. And it's like, that sounds nauseating. That sounds like a panic attack just waiting to happen. We don't.
Soren: That's not happening. When I got 25 browser windows open, is it.
Conrad: There are some great tools for that. I just to get them out of the way.
Christian: That's what our son does every day. He just empties all the boxes with toys out on the floor.
Conrad: Oh yeah. Well.
Christian: It's a very zen environment to be in.
Conrad: There's a, there's a recreation involved in that kind of freedom. Like, it takes, it takes energy to keep things organized and it takes energy to. Kind of continuously review how things are currently put together and then to set your order of operations based on that. It takes a certain skill set. I think what I'm told is like less than 5% of the world has that particular level of what they call meticulousness around these kinds of things. And so it's very interesting to see how setting up that kind of world order for you to the point of really having a li, almost a literal empty room with very clearly defined labels for things, and then treating your time and your energy and your focus and your sort of mental awareness around how you go about stepping into a world of a box, interacting with a box, putting it away, and then going to the next thing. If that's what you need to do that day.
Christian: I like, I like the visual version of this. Yeah, I can definitely see the empty room.
Conrad: Point being.
Christian: Ton of boxes.
Conrad: Going back to the theme of outsourcing, what are you gonna give them A box. Give them a box.
Christian: Yeah.
Soren: Preferably give him a box that's in your room.
Conrad: Yes. Don't just give them some other box that's out there. That's not your box. You don't care about that box. Once that box comes into your room. All right. Different discussion. Yeah, I like that. Great. Add on. Soren.
Christian: So, con Conrad, with, if I was to start tomorrow outsourcing and I wanted to be as successful as possible, what would be the tips that, I should follow according to you?
Conrad: Step one, know your time. First and foremost, just run an audit if you haven't already, put together a checklist of the things that you tend to do. Second is from that list, get a sense of what are the things that you don't want to be doing anymore that you can figure out how someone who, to your point, for five to $10 an hour can take care of that responsibility for you. And is that sustainable? Know your math. So within the process of saying, all right, this is what this task costs me, this is how much time it takes me, and I do this x times a day, a week, a month. Okay, great. If I had that time back, This is what I could do with it. So I would treat that math of like, what's my opportunity cost that I'm leaving on the table by not outsourcing more business, not finding more business opportunities or servicing more customers. Okay, cool. There's your math right there. From there, go out and go to these marketplaces and say like, Hey, here is the job to be done. Like take your, take your tasks, take your operation, document it in a way that someone could come in and say, I've done that before. I understand what that looks like. I can do this. And then go and proceed and see if they can't set that sample taste, set that sample case study for them to actually see if they can do it and see if you can trust them with doing it. And then if you like them and you can trust them, go set up that operation again for a month. See if you can like, see if you can work with them for a month. And then you're golden. Now, you've bought your back your time. You've gotten through that experience set up. Like there are some other things you need to get to know in terms of like, you know, getting that set up legally and just being mindful of the new commitments that you're gonna take on when you start outsourcing for the first time, you realize like, oh my God, I have to pay someone now that's a new workflow beyond just yourself. Little things, but they will, they talk, listening to everyone who's ever done this before, they will tell you verbatim, it pays the dividends very quickly. Put that little trust in. Buy back your time. It's not out of this world. Yeah. You should be good to go from there.
Christian: Nice Conrad. Love it.
Soren: It does, it sounds to me like where we need to start is we gotta know our numbers. Yeah. We gotta know what our costs are and where our costs are in terms of, Compartments or boxes, and we gotta know what our revenue is and what is left, because we don't want to be stopped in our tracks in the process of outsourcing because we realize now that, oh, this is gonna cost this much. Can I, can I not? And then let emotional feelings, decide whether we proceed or not. Get the numbers straight. And the more we start. Outsourcing, the more important the numbers become in order to control our cash flow, but it's gonna give us that comfort and certainty that we do have the availability of funds to start delegating. We do feel good about the financial aspect, so now we just gotta find the right resources with the right competencies.
Conrad: Soren. I think you're bringing up one point that I think is really critical, and this is sort of this weird to your point Christian, it's like where does someone start? There may be a step zero here and that step zero may be you have to figure out within respect of your time audit, you need to recognize whether or not you're performing some of the other critical functions that you need to perform just to have sanity around your business. Are you even doing your own sense of what does it mean to be, what is it? What have you, what have you been doing to be successful with your business? Do you even know your own numbers? Do you even have time in your calendar allotted to do that kind of financial self-awareness and reporting? Because if not, you really can't move forward in a lot of respects. If you're too busy just working for the sake of working, and even if you are making a ton of money and you kind of have the feeling that like, oh yeah, I should be able to afford these things, I would still take a step back and go, you're already too busy to even pay mine to bringing someone else on. That is a danger in and of itself. Maybe just maybe, and I've been in this situation before where someone's like, look, I'm not gonna say no to the new business. If you're smart Conrad, if you can come in like, I know I can afford you at the very least, so you can come in and you can help me resolve my outsourcing needs without having to make me spend the time to get all my other stuff together. It's like, okay, fine. That's another opportunity. But I wouldn't appreciate that. That doesn't, that doesn't set a good foundation for you as the individual to be able to take a step back, take the time, get yourself on track, and then realize, okay, I can now go through this process of bringing on other people.
Christian: How do you take that mental step of saying, you know what, I got this big potential customer that is just knocking on my door, but I'm gonna say no thanks. Because I need to scale down my operations temporarily to get my stuff in order to then actually move two, three times faster than I used to. Like how do you, like, how do you.
Conrad: How do you come to terms with that? Yeah. It's a really interesting question. I think on one end you have to realize that there's always gonna be doors. There's always gonna be opportunities in front of you. Like if you got a big client opportunity that came up to you. I know it may seem like a once in a lifetime experience. It's probably not. Like if you can take a step back and look at how you got to that big client in the first place, you could probably replicate that process. Consider that option. Consider the sustainability aspects. If you bring on this big client and you fail miserably because it was an unsustainable relationship from the beginning, that's on you. And if you have that awareness, why would you operate illogically based on that? So you really like, I would make that mental sense of like, can I even reasonably take this person on? If the answer is no, then so be it. It was never an opportunity to begin with.
Christian: No.
Soren: I think to add to that, because. Christian and I have been through that process is that if you are too busy with everything, you really don't have the necessary time that you need to contemplate on the situation of your client and how you scale up that and how you improve that. You need to work on that and not in that. So that's a thousand dollars an hour job that you need to prioritize versus the $10 an hour job.
Conrad: Hard.
Soren: Is really crucial that you decide what your mental strength, sorry, what your skill strength is. Is that the strategic creative part or is it the production part slash project manager? So in my league, Gerba context, are you the entrepreneur? Are you the manager or the technician?
Conrad: Yeah.
Soren: Know who you need to bring into. Just start scaling.
Conrad: Yeah, I would say the thousand dollars an hour job, sometimes it can get really hard because it's not like someone's paying you. That thousand dollars right then and there for that hour, I think we get caught up in that realm of thinking like, oh, it's a thousand dollars an hour. It's worth that much, but no one's exactly handing me that check. Or, you know, or put or forwarding that into my Stripe account. You have to see it long term and it's hard. You have to really project that.
Soren: If you, if you are a tech, if you're a tech company and you are the product you have today and the product, you're gonna have a quarter from now, or two quarters from now, that's gonna be the add-on sale. Or the reason for why you're going to increase your pricing versus something else. It can be that, it can be your support for that matter, that is your product led growth, right?
Conrad: -.
Soren: I think you can figure out what the big value drivers are, your product, your support. I think it's a, it's a test of you really understanding what the flywheel is and what generates the business and bring in new clients.
Conrad: Yeah. I'll leave, I'll leave on this note. I think beyond all of that, when it comes to the nature of why we work in the first place, you have to imagine that there is an end of the day that isn't just about work, but it's kind of about everything else, about your ability to eat, breathe, sleep, enjoy time with, you know, family and loved ones, and to foster relationships outside of your professional sense. I try to remember how that time and energy and impact leads me to want to make this entire operation of what I'm performing in as a company sustainable without getting into that time itself. Like people like to think like, oh, I wish I had 24 hours a day. I wish I didn't have to sleep. I literally spoke to a, like my same client who we just bought back his time on the, on the design side. He was like, if only I didn't have to sleep. I'm like, why would you say that? What in the world are.
Christian: Nice to sleep.
Conrad: Sleep's awesome, right? You guys laugh in America, like, everyone here is crazy. Like where everyone here just wants to maximize every single minute, hour, second. It's like, that's not life.
Christian: No. True.
Conrad: And, but it takes a different type of awareness, right? And yeah, it's a, some fortune favors the ambitious here. But it's a, it's a heavy sacrifice.
Soren: Christian. He's saved, he understands now that he needs to buy back his time. I have two daughters, so they definitely helped me get to that point. It, gets to the point where it ain't just work.
Christian: No, Conrad, it was an absolute pleasure having here. Where if our dear listeners, want to look you up, where can they find you?
Conrad: You can find me on LinkedIn pretty effectively. You can also check out the Well Aware website. You can go to wearewellaware.com.
Christian: Sweet. We'll put in a link in the, in the show notes and, oh yeah, that's amazing having you. Thank you.
Conrad: Appreciate it guys. Happy Tuesday.