3 Ways Smart Wedding Pros Outsource the Busy Work

Question: I’m not very handy with design. How can I create some professional-looking documents without spending a lot of money?

“Good afternoon Stephanie & Jeff,

“We have been going through some of your training videos and they are FANTASTIC:) It is so nice to finally have a business mentor that understands the industry we are in. We have had Business Coaches and mentors in the past but they have never worked in the wedding industry and therefore their knowledge and help has been limited, so THANK YOU for coming into our lives and for sharing your knowledge – just the little we have learned so far has been a huge help – not to mention practical advice we can apply in our business with no real expense.

“I have a list of questions to ask but today I will just ask one:

“We have a form on our website called “Wedding Accessory Checklist” – it’s a checklist for all the Accessories you could possibly have for your wedding. We have created this checklist in Word and then converted it to a pdf to upload to our website.

“However, I was wondering do you have any tips or suggestions for websites that help create checklists / forms?

“I’m not overly happy with the way our Checklist currently looks and would love to make it more professional looking but I’m limited to using Word, Excel etc

Thanks for your help. Cheers”

Ellenore

Answer:

Hi, Ellenore!

Thanks so much for your kind words. I’m so happy to hear that our training has been helpful.

I have a confession to make: Word and Excel aren’t my thing, either. 🙂

Your question brings up a great point:

Spend your time on what you do best and hire someone to do the rest.

This is the key to growing and expanding your wedding business beyond the limitations of your personal time.

I’ve mostly had my assistant (who’s much better with Excel than I am) create spreadsheets and forms for me.

But what if you don’t have the money to invest, you ask? I have a solution for that!

If you’re not so hot at document creation, here are some resources to try:

1) Hire a local college student. Business or accounting majors are often geniuses with Excel, or you can even get a graphic design student to whip something up at $10 per hour (or less) for a couple hours work.

2) Fiverr.com – Pay just $5 to have someone do this for you. Search for “Excel spreadsheet” or “document creation” to find a gig that fits what you need.

3) Odesk.com – Post a job and have contractors bid for it. You’ll be able to choose from Excel and Word experts who charge as little as $2 an hour.

You can hire someone to do many tasks besides document creation. Think about the tasks you do that you hate the most and imagine how great it would be to give that job to someone else. Ah, sweet relief!

If you’re going to hire someone online, make sure they have at least 10 positive reviews to avoid a bad experience. The risk of hiring someone to do the tasks you aren’t good at is small, and the payoff is big!

What do you think about outsourcing?

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photo credit: Alan Cleaver via photopin cc