Outsourcing Lessons from a Chronic DIY Guy

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Outsourcing is a huge challenge for me. I’ve always been a DIY… do it yourself… kind of guy.

Whether it’s home improvements and renovations, fixing appliances, marketing my business, doing the bookkeeping, I always tried to do everything myself. Outsourcing was a foreign concept to me!

Sometimes it paid off. In fact a lot of the time it pays off. Like right now we’re renovating the home we bought two years ago.

The fact is, we didn’t buy this place for the house, we bought it because of this spectacular piece of land. Our feeling was you can always change or replace a structure but you cannot change the land. And what we found is really our dream property… our own lake on 160 acres of rolling hills and forests, completely private, yet only 45 minutes from a major city and 15 minutes from the closest town.

And the house itself was/is a solid structure but was in need of upgrading. Built in the mid 70s it had the original shag rugs, small rooms, some ugly tile, a dysfunctional kitchen, no garage, a living room roof that leaked and… well, you get the idea!

So we’re doing everything from tearing down walls, tearing up old shag carpeting and installing hickory hardwood floors and porcelain tiles, completely gutting the kitchen and starting over from scratch to design the kitchen we want. And many other projects throughout the house.

Outsourcing the things you cannot or should not do!

But… and this is the important part of this message… I’ve also come to learn that there are some things that I cannot do and some that I shouldn’t do! So, we’ve had contractors in for some of the major projects like replacing a section of leaky roof and building a new garage/workshop. And this spring we’ll have a contractor build a screened in deck overlooking the lake.

Those projects require skills, knowledge and tools that I just don’t have. And I’ve been around long enough now to recognize this!

The parts of the project we’re doing ourselves are both very satisfying and economical. But outsourcing those large projects that require specialized skills and knowledge is something I learned I needed to do.

Outsourcing was NOT part of my make-up!

That lesson came slowly. I used to try to do everything myself. Partly that was driven by my lack of funds, partly my need to feel in control.

When I started my first business… long before desktop computers… I did my own bookkeeping. This, in spite of the fact that I had never done any bookkeeping nor did I have any training whatsoever! So as usual, with an instruction book in one hand and pencil and ledger in the other, I attempted to follow along. I did all right for a short while, but eventually got to a point where outsourcing this was my only option.

And that’s where I started to learn that it was sometimes way more economical to outsource to an expert right from the outset, get it done right, and devote my time to the things I know I’m good at.

Sometimes I did it myself out of necessity

In the not so “good old days” when we struggled from paycheck to paycheck, if the washing machine or dishwasher broke, I would tackle the repairs. And I was generally successful at it too. So I had the bonus of repairing without outsourcing so no service call costs, just the cost of the parts, and the satisfaction of figuring something out that in reality I never would have tried had I not been forced to by circumstances.

But of course those repairs took me days to complete. So there we’d be with a dishwasher on it’s side partially dismantled, spread out around the kitchen floor. I’d figure out what part I needed and order it then pick it up on my lunch hour or on my way home from work. And then put the thing back together and hope it would work, which it generally did.

These days, my choice is to outsource to an expert. They come in, assess what’s wrong very quickly because they have lots of experience, do the repair and usually are back up and running again in a matter of hours!

Bottom line: In business, outsourcing is a must. You cannot know, be and do everything in a business. Know what you’re really good at and what you really like to do and focus on doing those things really really well. Then, start to work out all the tasks you can outsource.

I’ll write more in another post about the logistics. Just know that outsourcing is the best way for you to leverage your time and find the expertise you need to propel you business forward.