Knowing when you should hire somebody on Upwork comes down to one of seven reasons. By the end of this article, you’re going to know exactly what those seven reasons are so you can better understand and identify when it’s time for you to post that RFP on Upwork.
Reason 1: You don’t actually have the expertise
The first reason why you might want to hire somebody on Upwork is because you don’t actually have the expertise that you need to get the job done. In this situation, you could either give up before even trying, or even just upload videos without any sense of editing. But that all comes with downsides such as bad retention or not actually giving the best product for your viewer. So instead you could turn to Upwork to fill that void in terms of your skillset.
Hiring Upworkers can be a great way for you to supplement some of the weaknesses that you might have in your situation. Upwork can be the answer for those situations. For example, maybe you’re putting together a really important presentation and nobody on your team can really make a polished quality presentation. What you could do is you could get your team to put together all the core content. And then from there, pass it over to an Upworker to make it pretty for you.
Reason 2: You need extra bandwidth with your team
the second reason why it might be time to hire an Upworker, which is that you need extra bandwidth on your team in order to achieve your goals. A good example is a few months ago for work, I had to run an impact study with our customers and I didn’t have time to actually make a pretty one-pager to use as a summary for all the findings that we got from our customers.
So what I did was I went on to Upwork and I hired a visual designer who was really good at InDesign to essentially create a one-page handout that we could consistently give to all of our prospects in the future that educated them on the findings of my impact study. So in this situation, I was too busy trying to collect the data points and reach out to our customers to get those data points that I didn’t actually have time to put together the design assets that I needed. So I leaned on an Upworker to fill that void while still allowing me to achieve my other team goals.
Upworkers can be a great way to expand the bandwidth on your team, especially when you’re running up on a tight deadline. That being said, though, what I recommend for you is to leave a little bit of a buffer of your actual ideal deadline. Just that both of you guys are not stressed about the situation in working toward your goals.
Reason 3: You don’t want to do a particular process yourself anymore
The third reason why it might be time to hire an Upworker is when you don’t want to do a particular process yourself anymore. Maybe there’s something in your job that you really hate. Well, there’s actually a case to be made that you could actually hire an Upworker to do that for you. For example, a lot of times in the past, I’ve had different CRM issues in terms of data integrity that I have to clean or maybe I’m merging different duplicate contacts, or I’m just updating some sort of telephone fields so that it’s all standardized across thousands of entries.
As opposed to spending my own time to do that, what I’ll do is I’ll make a video of me doing that task five or six different times, and then I’ll hire an Upworker virtual assistant to help me complete that task. A lot of times, there are going to be processes that you don’t want to do yourself, or you know, that somebody else is more than capable of doing.
And so it’s actually better for you to take a step back and delegate that work to somebody else so that you can focus on where your time is best spent. In the case where you’re in a more strategic role, or maybe you’re a business owner, it’s more important for you to be focusing on your actual business and scaling it than for you to be doing these sorts of more on the grounds tasks that you know you can be delegated to a contractor. These situations can be great for relieving some stress as well, because you don’t have to think about the fact that every single day you have to go through the CRM and vet through all the duplicate contacts and whatnot. You can build a system in place in which you have an Upworker just doing that on a weekly basis or a bi-weekly basis if it’s a really bad situation.
So whatever the case may be for you, when you’re in situations where you can clearly define exactly what the end goal is, and you can compartmentalize the different pieces that you need done, that can be a good situation for you to consider bringing in an extra hand in the form of a contractor.
Reason 4: You have a really clear understanding of exactly what work needs to get done
The fourth time period, when you might want to hire an Upworker is when you have a really clear understanding of exactly what work needs to get done. This is something that I’ve kind of highlighted with my earlier examples, but in each of the examples, I’ve shared so far in this video, the details something in which there’s a clear outcome of what I want done.
In the case where I’m running a YouTube channel, it’s going to be the videos edited. In the case where it’s the duplicate context in the CRM, it’s going to be all those duplicate contacts being cleaned, or in the case of my impact study, it was the one pager that we created in order to share to prospects.
Reason 5: You have the budget to actually scale
The fifth time period, when it might be time to hire somebody on Upwork is when you have the budget to actually scale. This is a really great time for you to bring somebody on board, because it means that your time can actually be opened up to focus on more of those strategic priorities.
In the case where your time is worth a hundred dollars an hour, and you’re spending an hour cleaning those dupli contacts in your CRM, you need to take a step back and realize that hiring somebody for five to $10 for an overseas virtual assistant to help you clean those contexts is probably a better use of your time than you yourself doing that. So if you find yourself in the situation where you had the budget to scale up your team, I always encourage you to do so because that’s how you’re going to get even more done for your overall business or project or whatever it is that you are building.
Reason 6: You feel like you’re losing your mind with your business or your job
The six time period when it might be a good time to hire somebody on Upwork is when you feel like you’re losing your mind with your business or your job. If you find yourself in a situation where you’re getting super stressed or bogged down by all the things on your plate, it means that you’re probably not delegating enough to other people on your team, or you don’t even have a team in place.
So by hiring somebody on Upwork to help you out in these different areas, it can be a great stress reliever. For example, it’s really a great stress reliever to know that every single week I have at least 10 to 20 articles being released on my different niche websites, just because I have a team of writers that are writing content every single day.
And that means that I don’t have to write the content. And instead I can just focus on doing the keyword research, which I enjoy doing more anyways.
Reason 7: You are working way too many hours
That naturally leads to the seven time period when it would be good to hire a Upworker, which is when you are working way too many hours. If you’re working too many hours, it means that you’re not working smarter and you’re just working harder.
And that only works for a certain period of time before you reach a point of burnout. So to fight that burnout, you’re going to want to just take a step back, document and create standard operating procedures for what an Upworker could help you with, and then from there start to hire and onboard those people. I know it can seem really daunting at first, if you’ve never hired somebody in your life before, but once you do the first one, it only gets easier from there. So keep that in mind and remember that in the case where you are able to onboard somebody that could mean opening up 3, 5, 10, or even more hours in your week so that you can focus again on those more strategic things.
If you found this article helpful, be sure to check out my YouTube channel to get new videos every single week. I’ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, feel free to share this with anybody that you think might also benefit from these signs that it’s time to hire someone on Upwork.