DIY vs. "right" sourcing

First, let me apologize for taking so long to post another entry here. We are in our busiest season ever and I have not yet disciplined myself to make time for entries in this blog when I am being pulled elsewhere. Also, I spent a few days last week at Denis Reggie's Conclave and learned SO much that I have been struggling with prioritizing what to talk about first.

Then, something happened...

Over the weekend, I got involved in a discussion about some fundamental philosphies of small/startup business growth and success. It started out innocently enough as a post on David Jay's OSP blog praising our new FREE color correction service. (http://opensourcephoto.blogspot.com/...age-rocks.html) However, with input from [b]ecker, DJ, Gary Fong and many others, it quickly snowballed into a truly excellent exchange of ideas and beliefs. I won't rehash the lengthy thread here, though I will relay my thoughts on this and invite further discussion, here.

First, let me state that the DIY workflow concept pre-dates outsourcing/Pictage by a couple of decades, so I am referring to the underlying doctrine of DIY in small business.

Second, I do not think that it conceptually has anything to do with photography or a particular workflow.

Finally, please remember that I have never shot a wedding nor been paid for capturing images in my life, and my experience lies entirely in building/helping small businesses to maximum success in the shortest amount of time. And, simply put, this almost certainly means retaining those things you MUST do (or most efficiently, like selling/marketing yourself) and externalizing everything else that you can afford.

If I had to point at a single cause of most of the small/startup business failures I've seen over the last 25 years, it is letting short-term cash-flow oriented decisions undermine long-term, strategic ones, like thinking that DIY is somehow cheaper because it uses less immediate cash.

One simple measure of that (in this industry) could be someone that outsourced early in their growth (like DJ or Mike Colon) and focused ALL of their attention on marketing their business. Look at their growth speed and relative success compared to your own.

And to make one more important point clear: its not about more FREE-TIME, its about more FREE-DOM. The Freedom to network, educate, innovate, sell, market and all the other things that it is impossible to spend enough time doing. Every minute you spend self-fulfilling orders, or handling a support call, or writing and sending out promotional emails, or working with product vendors to expand the tail of your product catalog is a LOST minute that ONLY YOU could've spent on succeeding.

One of the primary lessons that every successful business learns early is, "Do what you do best, and delegate the rest." DIY is fundamentally against that, since even when you hire someone internally to do it, you still retain the responsiblity for its completion - and that is the time-suck that will eventually slow and/or pull you down.

And, because I like simplicity, let me give you my basic "growth optimization" priority steps.

Step #1 - NEVER outsource something critical to your growth and survival. Ever. In a small, lifestyle business like wedding photography, this normally includes networking for referrals, reputation marketing and other outbound things that require your touch.

Step #2 - Outsource as many "profit" centers as you can find. Profit centers are places where the cost of the outsourcing is absorbed in revenue resulting from the service/product. Unless the cost of outsourcing actaully is more than the cost of the service/product, this will yield multiple values to #1. In this market, the big one in this category is product fulfillment.

Step #3 - Outsource "cost" centers based on your level of expertise in those areas and the multiple of time it takes to do them, compared to an outsourced solution. A good example of this is accounting, unless you are an accountant.Bottom line is that every hour you gain from #2 is an added hour to #1 - and #1 is the only mission-critical step to growth.

Finally, and just to be 100% clear, I personally believe the DIY is not the best way to go for maximum small/startup business growth - I've felt this way for over 2 decades and, while the Pictage community's meteoric growth in the last few years has certainly reinforced that belief, it did not create it.

jeff