If you deprive yourself of outsourcing and your competitors do not, you’re putting yourself out of business. -Lee Kuan Yew

In the traditional brick and mortar business world, you had to hire a new person if you needed more help. If that person didn’t work out, you’d have to fire and replace him or her.

Outsourcing is far simpler because you don’t hire a person and pay for healthcare, equipment, supplies, insurance, taxes, or additional benefits to attract quality employees. Instead, you hire a person’s services on a contract basis, either ongoing or a onetime job. For example, let’s say you need to design and print signs, flyers, or menus. Rather than hire a desktop publisher and graphic artist as an employee (and buy the necessary graphic design software and printing equipment), you could just outsource this work to a graphic design artist who already has all the necessary equipment to design and print your material.

Outsourcing isn’t just for onetime projects, such as writing a white paper or designing a web site; it can be used for work traditionally done by employees. If you need work done that doesn’t require the person to be in the same office building, you can outsource the work to a virtual employee. For example, most companies don’t want to deal with the hassle of hiring accountants and bookkeepers to print payroll checks for their employees. Instead, they hire an outside payroll and bookkeeping service to do the work.

Some other tasks suitable for outsourcing include:

• Customer support Writing articles, ad copy, white papers, and so forth
• Computer tasks (such as programming, web page designing, or desktop publishing)
• Manufacturing Shipping and fulfillment Hiring

Outsourcing gives you the freedom to literally change workers at any time.

When you hire a traditional employee and that person doesn’t do the job you wanted, you can either focus on training the employee (spending time and money) or firing and hiring a new employee (wasting time). With outsourcing, if you don’t like the work of one person or company, you can choose another one for the same or even less cost.

To use this site, you post a description of the work you need done and then people bid on your project. Many people bidding on projects will include their resume so you can see their work and experience. If they’ve been involved with a particular web site for a while, they may even have customer satisfaction ratings that can help you identify who might be more reliable.