What is “A Better Way to Work”?
Welcome to my blog, which I’m calling “A Better Way to Work.”
Why? Because I believe that the idea of “work” that most of us grew up with – a 40-hour-a-week job working for someone else, with a commute, a boss and co-workers, vacation and sick days, office politics and all the rest – is going the way of the dinosaur.
What’s replacing it?
People who own their own businesses and work from home, providing services to other businesses and individuals.
We build the equivalent of a full-time job by combining part-time and project work for a number of companies. We go by the name of freelancer, consultant, independent contractor, virtual assistant, or solopreneur.
We set our own hours, and we don’t have to get permission to take time off for a school play or when one of the kids gets sick. We do the kind of work we enjoy, defining our own jobs and not having to hope we get promoted someday. We control how much we earn, by deciding how much to charge and how many hours to work.
There are millions of people pursuing this vision, according to the U.S. Census Bureau (which identified more than <a title=”Census Bureau report” href=”http://www.census.gov/epcd/nonemployer/2006/us/US000.HTM” target=”_blank”>20 million businesses </a>without employees in the U.S. alone).
But it comes with a downside.
Most of us work more hours than we want to. We wear more hats than we would like, and we spend too much time doing things we don’t enjoy. And we all want to make more money.
We don’t want to give up the vision. We love the control and flexibility we get from owning our own businesses. But how do we make it work better?
We hear that outsourcing is the answer. Being able to hand off work you don’t enjoy so you can focus on the things that give you greater leverage – it sounds perfect.
But I don’t think there’s anyone out there who has tried outsourcing and not run into problems. You hear horror tale after horror tale – projects that ran over budget by 300% and still weren’t done right, freelancers who disappeared with critical files, customers that were lost, work that had to be abandoned.
Does that make outsourcing wrong?
No. Outsourcing can be the right answer.
It is not the solution for everyone and for every type of work. But it does solve a lot of problems – we just need to do it the right way.
And this blog is going to be all about how to make outsourcing work in your business.
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