Every Business Should Use Offshore Talent for This Position

For fun, I have recently been working as a “Fractional Chief Outsourcing/Systems” Officer for a few SMBs.

It’s been a blast - and it lets me have an outsized impact on a growing company’s trajectory.

One of my clients mentioned that going into “slow season,” he was afraid he might have to lay a few people off.

What a bummer.

He is in residential home services, so I asked,

 “Do you get referral business? Who sends you leads?” 

He said,

“Yes - realtors, they love working with us and send us business all the time.”

BINGO.

I had an outsourcing trick up my sleeve for him - that could kick up a LOT of business if used intelligently.

We hopped on Upwork.com and posted the below ad. This is literally the ad - verbatim:

• I need 5 hours of work done today.

• You will be using online websites, tools, etc, to find as many residential realtors as possible in Las Vegas, Nevada.

• You will create a google spreadsheet with:Company Name, Website Link, Name, and personal (not info@) contact information

We then hopped over to Lex (Free AI copy generator).

We needed to create a lead magnet - something to “Give" to the target referral partners before we “Ask” for a referral.

We brainstormed a bit - and he said:

“Realtors always love cabinet & interior decoration color guides to keep up with the latest trends.” 

Perfect.

We outlined that headline, and a few paragraph headings, then let the AI fill in the rest. We did some light editing, and voila!

This took about 8 minutes.

We took a (free) Canva template, put his logo on it, and formatted our newly generated text into it.

We now have “something of value” for the realtors he is targeting as referral partners.

A beautiful one-of-a-kind document called “2022 Interior Cabinet Color Guide - Las Vegas”.

The original Upwork post had been up for 20 minutes, and we now had about 40 applicants (yes, you read that right) at an average rate of $3/hour.

We picked one with a bunch of experience and hired her immediately. I’ll write a separate post on Upwork best practices; I’ve spent more than a million bucks on the platform.

NOTE: Could we have theoretically used some fancy “SaaS” product to do this?

Sure - there are dozens of companies claiming to be able to do this. However, I’ve found that low-cost overseas labor is faster, less expensive, and more flexible for the needs of 99% of my businesses.

Here are a few tips on hiring “lead researchers” for your business:

• Specify what types of info and targets you want the researcher to get - usually info@ or the main phone number is worthless, so be sure to say that!

• Designate the columns and document type you want the research output in. I always have them create and share a google sheet with me so I can watch their progress as they do the research and redirect them if needed.

• I’ve had great success with folks from South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh). They tend to be very low cost ($2-$4/hour).

• Be sure to cap the hours! They will literally research for 20 hours if you let them.

Within 5 hours, we had a huge, clean, well-formatted list of Las Vegas residential realtors.

The exact people who can potentially refer business to my client’s company.

We’ll be using our new “Free Guide” to start conversations with our targets.

This post is already long enough, so I’ll break this topic into two pieces - as the second part is just as important.

Part 2 will be about how to use outsourced talent to target this freshly generated list.

Happy Outsourcing!

Jon