I don't know about you, but I can't design a blue rectangle in Adobe Illustrator. Nor can I code this web page you're looking at. But I am good at managing a business, and building a brand.

This is why partners, contractors, and employees come in handy. This is also why no one can ever do something all alone. Perhaps you have tens of thousands of dollars in the bank you can pay employees with. However, it's more likely as an inventor or entrepreneur, you need a way to get the job done, and done cheaply.

This brings us to outsourcing. Although outsourcing and offshoring have a negative bias in the news, they are the life support for small businesses.  I'm talking about getting your business going by outsourcing website development, logo design, even administrative help. Believe it or not, ideatango was built on the back of outsourcing. Take our logo. Yea, we'd like to say we designed it, but actually someone else came up with the concept and we tweaked it. Pretty good job, eh?

So where you can you get started outsourcing? There are a couple really good websites that we've had good experience with.

• Elance.com - you can get graphic designers, virtual administrative assistants, programmers, and more to bid on your project. The best feature about this website is the feedback rating where you can check to make sure you're working with a quality provider. Most of the providers are outside the US, thus cheaper, but harder to manage.
  
• Designoutpost.com - really good for logos and general graphic design.  Most of the graphic designers are in the US.
• Rentacoder.com - hire web designers, programmers, and developers through this site. I haven't personally used it, but have heard it recommended by those who have.

There are tons more out there, but those are some of the biggest.

What to watch out for when outsourcing 

Although you can really save lots of money using the skills of others, you need to be smart. When selecting a provider, make sure you do a thorough background check and see if the provider can live up to your standards, and your complex project.  We had this problem when getting someone to do some a large project for us. Although they had a pretty website that made them look like they knew what they were talking about, they hadn't worked on complex projects like ours. Not only that, but they underbid the job - which we didn't realize at the time. And they took 6 times as long to complete the project than they said they would.

Where did we go wrong? We did check that providers feedback and spoke to a few of their references, but we didn't do as thorough a job as we should have.  Also, at the time, we were new to developing websites, so we weren't 100% sure what to look for. If we were to do it again, we'd watch more closely for red flags: costs that are too low, unreasonable timelines, lack of feedback from clients. We would have spoken to more references, rather than just a handful. 

But the amount of due diligence you do on your provider depends on the size of the project.  Obviously, if you're getting a logo designed, or a brochure written, it's not as critical to call on references. Any outsourcing project will take longer than if you had a friend who could help you, or if you're proficient at what you're trying to do. But by outsourcing you can free up some of your time to work on the more important tasks.

To this day, we still use outsourcing to hire contractors and part-time help and recommend entrepreneurs and inventors to do the same.

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