As a small business owner, I tend to have a limited amount of free time. So I'm constantly looking for ways to pay for "complete" things.
Recently I hired a gardner for my home to come once a week and take care of things. He started cutting the grass and doing "gardening" things, but also morphed into making the Home Depot run, suggesting where to put certain plants, and generally taking ownership of the outside of my home. A pretty good deal for someone to take care of all of this for a reasonable price without me having to worry about it. It also beat the pants off the service who just came and cut the grass once every two weeks. (I fired those guys)
Similarly, we chose a payroll company who takes care of every single aspect of the payroll. Every two weeks, I take 5 minutes to tell them how many hours people worked each fortnight, and they do everything else. From paying the taxes, direct deposits, withdrawals, handling employee loans, vacations and pretty much everything else. I'm extremely happy to pay Oasis Outsourcing the quite reasonable fee they charge me every month, because I don't have to lift a finger once everything else is setup.
But how about taking this whole concept further?
Instead of just paying $29.99 to 37Signals for Basecamp every month, how about if I pay a few hundred dollars a month to someone who just made sure all the tasks were completed on time? This meant interfacing with everyone in basecamp a few times a week, and sending me a weekly report with whats up.
What about my social media campaign and blogging? Instead of just telling me how to do social media, why don't I just pay $99 per month for a certain level of blog posts and tweets and for you to keep in the loop with what my company is doing? Charge me more to do more strategic blogging, Facebook and tweeting.
When offering an accounting services (this is a big bugbear), why not do it end-to-end? Make sure you take care of every transaction that happens through my bank, no matter how small, and account for it. Pay my taxes at the end of the quarter. And send me weekly reports with whats going on. Heck, I'd pay a few hundred dollars a month for that service. Just take all the work and worry out of my hands. Make me not have to lift a finger.
See... there are a thousand people competing to come only cut my lawn every two weeks. But not enough people competing to offer a richer, regular gardening service, which is way more lucrative, and way more useful.
We sometimes pick the easiest possible thing to do, but could do so much better if we just broadened our horizons a little bit more.
