Think As Though You Were Hiring Someone Else
If you thrive in a bit (or a lot) of creative chaos, then this is going to be a great solution for you.
If you can’t keep track of everything and you sort of do your work as it comes and to no particuar schedule, then this is something you want to think about.
A Bit Of History
Like all writers, I got in to y head that I wanted to build a publishing empire long before I had the knowledge, patience or other good qualities to actually do so.
And like everyone else who thinks this is the right idea when it isn’t, I set about hiring a freelancer.
It was a disaster.
I hired a ghost-writer to write a specific story that I had planned.
What I got was a completely different story that I couldn’t do anything with because the writer had taken it upon themselves to use their creative flair to undo my plan.
For a long time, I was pretty down about this. The project had been a failure.
To this day, I never outsource any writing because of it.
What Went Wrong:
It is easy to blame the writer for this sort of thing.
After all, I gave them a plan, and they ignored it.
Really though, this wasn’t a problem with the writer (who wasn’t a bad writer) it was a problem with my management. I should have specified at every stage what I wanted done and then stuck with it and generally micro-managed. Understand, I’m far from a micro-manager. In fact, I’m the opposite.
There was the problem.
Realisation
You can’t manage a writing project if you can’t manage your own writing. It’s why that plague of e-book writers from internet marketing forums had a really short stay in publishing when the kindle gold rush dried up.
I couldn’t manage that writer I hired because I didn’t have any decent system in pace to manage myself. This was long before I kept records of my writing or planned to a schedule or anything like that.
Did that writer have problems?
Yes. If a client gives you an outline, you should follow it, whether it’s copywriting or creative writing or any other project.
In fact, I know that the writer I’m talking about no longer writes professionally because it interfered with her creativity (and she couldn’t keep to deadlines either.) So she had her own issues.
But I couldn’t manage her until I learned a lesson.
Before you hire anyone, you have to have the process down
There are very few employees who are going to care as much about your business as you are. So if you are going to outsource any work, you need to make the work they have to do easier, take less time and be more fool-proof than anything you do for yourself.
That means knowing the process in and out.
If you go to Fiverr or oDesk and ask a person to write a 500 word article, then understand you might well get that article in gibberish, with no headline, no paragraph breaks and in a format your computer can’t even read.
That’s why you need to specify.
Everything you do in your day-to-day business needs to be labelled as a step-by-step if you ever pan to expand.
Closing thoughts
… and really, you should do this even if you aren’t trying to expand.
Having processes down allows you to automate them. It allows you t concentrate on things you can’t outsource or automate. It also allows you to identify where you can do better.
So really, a good business practice for the day is to organise your work as you would if you were going to hire someone to do it for you.