Sounds too good to be true? Let’s work through an example:

Say you’re earning £50 per hour. Any time you spend doing a task which you could pay someone less than £50 per hour for is money lost. Every job has these tasks - especially for the self employed.

So you pay an assistant £10 per hour to do the work. You have just made £40 profit on that hour, and have one extra hour you didn’t have before.

You can use this extra hour to earn at £50 per hour.

Let’s break down what’s happened:

+ £50 income from the outsourced hour
+ £50 income from the extra hour you saved
- £10 paying the assistant
—————————————-
+ £90 income per hour

Your income has just increased by 80%.

Economists amongst you will recognise this as a demonstration of opportunity cost.

Clearly you’re not going to be able to outsource ALL your work, but in every job there is work that simply does not need you to do it. And if you keep doing it you’re wasting money.