A couple of weeks ago, I had to deal with a situation that has cost me a lot of time and money, because what I was working on was not an income producing item!

How many of you have done this same thing, because you feel that to pay someone to do something that you feel you can learn just doesn’t make sense to you? But I challenge you to instead think, what it’s costing you every time you take time away from your income producing items to learn these new techniques?

If you’ve never thought about this let me give you an example – If you provide coaching services and you charge $200 an hour and you take 3 hours out of your schedule to work on your bookkeeping when you could have hired a bookkeeper to do this for you at $10-$20  an hour then you just cost yourself $600 when you could have spent $30-$60 instead!

I can be very technically challenged so when my website went down I decided that I would try to figure this out since my web person was on vacation. This truly cost me a lot of time and money, not to mention some piece of mind. Because, I spent wayyyy too much time trying to get it back online when it probably would only take my web person a few minutes to do the task.

First I had to learn the proper language to even know what I needed to do. It took me 4 calls to my hosting company to find out that I still wasn’t not going to be able to bring my website online. I could have saved myself a lot of heartache, time, money, and frustrations if I would have just waited on my web designer to get back from vacation instead of trying to fix the problem myself. I figured that I could have it done by the time she got back and I couldn’t afford to have my website down for a few days!

What I found out in the process is that:

• I didn’t understand the language, which in turn cost me more time, because I was saying one thing and getting the answers according to my questions which were not totally correct or complete. Plus I was getting only pieces of the problem instead of getting everything I needed at once due to my lack of knowledge and understanding.
• I ended up taking steps tat I didn’t need to take, because I was not totally understanding what was and was not required. My web designer had the program that the technical customer service person had me download, so I really didn’t need to take this action, but did anyway.
• It’s not a good idea to be the in-between person. By talking to my web designer via email and text messages and trying to relay that information to the technical customer service personnel of my hosting site I wasn’t always relaying the information correctly and the answers I was receiving was based on the information I was giving them. This in turn caused more and more frustration and cost more time!
• By the 4th call I was truly close to tears and ready to just give up and say forget it. Not only that, I didn’t get any of my income producing items accomplished because I was too busy dealing with the thing I had already outsourced.
• I need to make sure I have a back-up and it will be worth the extra cost not to have to deal with this situation again and allow myself to end up totally frustrated, almost in tears, feeling lost and unless, and being unproductive or a week which cost me too much money!