I’ve been self employed in a home based business for over 20 years and for the most part, I love it. But the trouble with being “your own boss” is that you are also your own employee and you can end up working just as hard, and being a slave to your work, every bit as much as working for someone else. And my boss (me) can be a real slave driver too.
Working in a service based business as I have (design and web design) also means trading hours for dollars as surely as if you were punching a clock. And no matter how high your hourly rate gets, there are only so many productive hours in a day. So there is a natural cap on how much you can make.
The only way to blast through that ceiling is to take advantage of the concept of leverage. Folks talk about OPM - other peoples money – and that is a form of financial leverage. I want to talk about OPW – other peoples work – as a way to leverage the work and efforts of others.
I recently discovered (and about time too!) the beauty of outsourcing some of my consulting work. I found through a service called Rent a Coder a very talented and hungry programmer in Ukraine that does amazingly great work for very little money (in US dollars anyway).
Instead of banging my head against the wall to learn Action Script, I can now hire Opal in the Ukraine to do the work and still charge my client a fair hourly rate. I am now manager and creative director and no longer the worker bee. Yippee! I just gave myself a huge promotion and a big raise.
And I am leveraging the expertise and labor of Opal to accomplish the job needed, offering a great service to my client, giving interesting and challenging work to Oleh and with both of us making money. It’s a win-win-win and I cannot imagine why it took me so long to learn how to do this. My [tag]home based business[/tag] is now able to leverage other people far away from my home office.
I am now hiring a part time assistant in India who is trained in all the aspects of search marketing, to do the tedious postings and submissions that I do not care to do or have time to do. But that $400 per month I spend on this assistant I can leverage into thousands of dollars in revenues per month.
Outsourcing is a science and art in itself and beyond the scope of this article. For a great all around outsourcing service, see Sylvia Fortin’s Workaholics For Hire. The key, as Sylvia will tell you, is not to hire some individual out on his own somewhere, but to hire a project manager that can in turn delegate to the right person, the particular task you require.
Another form of leverage is in working 2 tier or multi level marketing businesses. Now, MLM has a tainted reputation for good reason: much of it is crap and based on inflated prices of some not so great product so that the founders and early adopters can make money. However the concept of multi level marketing is sound and there are good companies and good opportunities out there. And it is a good example of leveraging the efforts of others to accomplish your goals.
“I’d rather have 1% of 100 people’s efforts than 100 of my own”
That’s the beauty of leverage: you work to sell your program and build your team, then collect residuals from the work that THEY do, while you are off on your next project, or perhaps relaxing on the beach in Fuji.
I have been though many such programs, have seen the value but not made any money. Now, I am making money in a program that is not really multi-level but is simply 2-tier. That is, I make money on all the sales of my front line, but not beyond that. But in this case, that is fine because I earn $200 on each sale of my front line and $600 on each of my own direct sales. And it is 90% automated and not so too hard to do. I made my first sale last week and deposited $800 directly into my checking account.
The company is called Abunza and is now in pre-launch so is riding the wave of energy of what is certain to be a huge company in the early stages. You can learn more about this opportunity on this web page, which is pretty much exactly the same web page you will also get to promote, complete with killer video and your very own list building opt-in form. You just do your own article writing and advertising. Just do it and go there now!: http://wayne.abunza.com
Happy home based business leveraging!
Tags: No Comments