My sons love Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. They can watch this show for hours, if we let them. Occasionally when I’m not writing or find myself needing a break, I will watch a couple of minutes. All parents do! It’s our form of downtime.
Looking at Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, it’s run like a business. Mickey is the President, CEO and Founder. He’s the Boss. He’s got his own little team 
of helpers. Mickey outsources. Yes he does. He has his friends (Free Labor!), handy helpers and Toodles. Let’s not forget his mentor, Professor Von Drake.
The truth is this how successful businesses work. The writers of the show are using what works for people and showing our kids successful ways of a busy mouse-preneur.
The only way to get ahead is to outsource your tasks. Here is the issue – we all have the same amount of time in the day. Not saying outsource everything, hello, I’m on my laptop on a bus writing this right now. I’m also not telling you to outsource to people either. The funny thing is you can find applications to save you time. Mickey outsources to mechanical hands.
Here are some different ways of outsourcing your tasks like Mickey Mouse:
Cloud Applications
I use to write up each of my own invoices on excel and manage my clients through spreadsheets. I know many people that still do this. It’s hours of work! I use FreshBooks now and have saved thousands of wasted minutes a year. Your time is money and to be efficient, you must save time, to save money and eventually make more! This is how many people are successful with their online business today!
Another example of saving time is with Social Media Mangers like Hoot Suite or Sprout Social.
Also I was just turned onto a great app to create graphics instead of using Photoshop. Instead of paying someone or spending hours on Photoshop, I can create quick graphics for my social media in a matter of minutes with Picmonkey.com.
To save time and be able to do more things in the day start using Cloud applications that you can access on your computer or smartphone from anywhere.
Outsource to Virtual Assistants
Yes we all want to hang on to everything we do for online business. But if you don’t have a large enough budget to hire a full-time person for certain tasks, it doesn’t mean you or current employees still need to do it. If someone on your staff is making $25 an hour and you have them do something that’s not their strongest talent, it takes them 5 hours a week to do it. You may find someone on eLance or other VA related websites that can do the same task each week in 2 hours that are experts! You pay them $30 an hour. That’s $60 a week you are paying more for a task and free up your employee to do more of what they are the expert in. Since they are an expert the work is superior and you can focus more on your core business.
This could be anything from Social Media management, website updating, Internet marketing, bookkeeping, PR, graphic design and more.
Hire someone to build or maintain your website
I teach people how to build and maintain their own website, but its time consuming and hard. You can find a VA or a company to do this for you. I should mention I also do this for many small businesses (Check out ‘Work With Terry’)
It’s important to know that when you have a website, you need to update and maintain the backend (Software!!) and the frontend (CONTENT!!). You can outsource both, but if you are not technical get some help with the backend part first.
Get up and dance!
Now at the end of the show they all get up and dance. Why are you siting down? You just learned that you need to run a business like Mickey Mouse. Get up and dance! Enjoy the free time. Go get a drink and celebrate!
How do your outsource your online business work? What have you been doing for a long time that you now have something or someone else doing? What and how will you be like Mickey Mouse and outsource now? Let’s get the conversation started.
To Your Tech Success,
-Terry