Small business owners are often reluctant to give up control of their day-to-day tasks for fear that the jobs won’t be completed with the same accuracy or speed that they would provide. I have personally operated under that time consuming philosophy for many years.  Yes I expanded my business but constantly working left little time for a personal life.

 

I recently joined a membership site called “ReplaceMyself”. The main focus of this site is to help you find “qualified” individuals from the Philippines to off load many of your time consuming tasks or utilize them in areas where you lack the technical expertise to complete a project for about $400.00 per month. My personal reasons for joining revolved around SEO and PHP programming needs I had to ramp up my efforts on a new income stream. I tried to hire someone from Guru.com and the project quote was $3000.00 for a 2 month project…. (YIKES!)  Needless to say, I was not willing to spend that kind of money on my new business venture.

 

The membership cost is $97.00 per month. I’m sure that some of you would believe that to be a lot of money but when I calculated the time it would take me to learn all the tricks of the process, I realized that it would cost me more than twice as much to do this on my own.  What tricks you ask?  In the first month I got tips on:

• Where to find the worker’s
• How to pay them and negotiate a monthly salary
• Example contracts to seal the deal
• Tax concerns for your business
• Jump starting your project with “pre-screened “workers – (which I jumped on!)

Each month you receive a new training module designed to share with your worker on key topics for Internet Marketing such as:

• SEO
• Keyword search
• Video marketing
• Article marketing
• Using the power of Squidoo

There are also many bonuses provided with your monthly membership. One of the biggest perks to me is the free Project Planning component called MyProjectPlan. This free tool provides a mechanism to communicate/manage and provide training modules to your workers instead of using email. If you’ve every looked at the cost of web based Project Planning modules, you’d see that this component can save you about $ 100 – $200 per month for multiple users.

 

If you are a “DO-IT-YOURSELF” kind of individual then this membership is not for you but if you are looking for inexpensive ways to free up time, then this is well worth the cost.   I’ve reduced the overhead of my first worker even more by sharing with one of my business associates and together we will be looking at hiring a second worker in the next month.

 

So did I replace myself?  Not totally, I still am working on the creative side of the new business venture but spending about 2 hours a day to expand my revenue streams!