Outsourcing at Its Finest

I have a very lovely chap here right now doing a deep clean of my oven. If you make homemade Yorkshire puddings, you'll understand why that matters.

Next week I've got a guy coming to deep clean all the carpets.

I have an amazing dog walker who takes my dog out every single day, rain or shine, without me having to think about it.

My robo-vacuum has a name, Clean Latifa, and despite me needing to rearrange rugs and furniture every time I want her to do a hoover or a mop, she saves me time and energy and does it for me.

My 17 year old daughter sits her driving test at the end of this month. I'm praying for a pass, because the second she's through, I'm outsourcing every last one of mum's taxi duties straight to her.

When I finally add a cleaner onto that list, I'll know I've made it.

Outsourcing at its finest.

Now, I absolutely could do all of these things myself. I could scrub the oven, hire the machine and shampoo the carpets, walk the dog twice a day and still be doing school and rugby runs for the next 5 ish years, at least. I'd probably save some money in the process too. But what would I actually lose by doing all of it myself?

Time. My single biggest, most valuable asset is my time, and it's a finite one. Every hour I spend on a task I don't love, or don't need to do, is an hour I don't get back, and it's an hour I'm not spending on the parts of my business, or my life, that only I can do.

Getting someone else to do these tasks on my behalf isn't just about my time. It's also about paying for someone else's skill. The oven or the carpet guy does it better and faster than I ever could, because it's their area of expertise, not a Sunday afternoon chore I'm resenting the whole way through. There's real value in paying an expert to do a job well, rather than doing it adequately myself and being irritated about it for the rest of the day.

There's a knock on effect too. Every time I book the oven chap, the carpet cleaner, the dog walker, or that holy grail of one day, a cleaner, I'm putting money into a local tradesperson's pocket. Small local businesses survive on exactly this kind of decision, made over and over, everyday.

I'd also argue there's a mental cost to doing it all yourself that never makes it onto a balance sheet. A to do list with "deep clean oven" sitting on it for three months (probably more like six months in my case) isn't just a chore undone. It's a small weight you carry around every time you walk past that oven, on top of everything else you're already carrying. Outsourcing doesn't just buy me back the hour here and there. It buys back the headspace too.

Where this gets interesting for your firm

Look, I really didn't sit down to write a blog post about my oven. I sat down to write about outsourcing in business, and the oven guy just happened to be here. But the two things aren't as far apart as they sound.

If you run an advice firm, you already know what it's like to have a to do list longer than the hours in your day. Consumer Duty alone has piled admin on top of admin. A 2024 Censuswide survey commissioned by Octopus Money, which surveyed 203 UK advisers, found that more than a third report their per client admin time has gone up because of reporting requirements, and the time to deliver a single advice case has, for many firms, more than doubled since Consumer Duty came in.

That's not a small dent in your week. That's your week.

A separate 2023 survey by CoreData, of 267 UK advisers, found that 28 percent of firms have already outsourced parts of their Consumer Duty compliance work. You've made peace with paying an expert to help carry that load. Marketing, though, tends to sit in a different category entirely, something you tell yourself you'll get to once the compliance deadline's cleared, or the reviews are done, or things calm down a wee bit. (Spoiler alert, they rarely calm down.)

I could do my own oven. You could do your own marketing. Neither of us would do it particularly well, and both of us would resent the hours it stole from the parts of the job we're actually good at.

Think about what your hour is worth. If an hour spent with a client, or on the advice work only you can give, is worth considerably more than the cost of getting your marketing handled properly, then doing it yourself isn't the cost saving it looks like on paper. It's the opposite. Every firm's numbers are different, so I won't pretend to give you a figure, but it's worth doing that sum for your own business, before you write the idea off.

There's also the quality point. A specialist who does this day in, day out will bring you better results, faster, with far fewer of the mistakes that come from doing something for the first time under pressure. I didn't do my own oven for years because I genuinely believed it would save money. It didn't. It just meant an average job, done reluctantly, on a Sunday I resented.

Outsourcing gives you flexibility that hiring doesn't, too. You can scale support up around a launch, a client event or a busy quarter, and scale it back down again afterwards, without carrying the overhead of a new member of staff on the books all year round. That's a very different commitment to taking someone on, and it suits a firm that doesn't yet know exactly how much marketing support it needs.

And you don't have to become something you're not to make any of this work. I'm confident that you didn't get into financial advice anticipating you'd add content creator to your to do list. Outsourcing the bits that aren't your trade means the bits that are your trade get your full attention instead.

The good thing is none of this means surrendering control of your firm, although it does mean being honest about where your hour is genuinely best spent, and letting someone else's expertise cover the rest, the same way I let the oven chap cover mine.

I'll let you know how the driving test goes. If she passes, that's one more thing off my list. If she doesn't, well, there's always next month, and I'll still be the one doing the school run.

Outsourcing at its finest, indeed.