Matt Barrie

Matt Barrie is the Founder & CEO of Freelancer.com – the world’s largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace. With a highly publicized and successful ASX listing, Matt will lean on his past experiences to teach your startup and company about the do’s and dont’s, and the perils of venture financing.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Matt’s success

Freelancing and outsourcing tasks

Result if you follow the steps in Matt’s session

Bring freelancers into your business to help you delegate repetitive tasks that will allow you to focus on higher level work

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

The easy jobs are the ones that start off very repetitive, you know.

If you find yourself doing something over and over again, and the job can really be described by an algorithm, you know, I get up, I do this, I do this, I do this, then I do this, right? This is a job that’s ideally suited to delegating to someone else, right?

Because you can actually, you can write down on a training manual and say, “Well, you know, this is what I do in this task. And here’s how I think about things and if this happens, I’m gonna step through and if this happens, we’re gonna step through”.

And so that’s good because it also frees you up to be more creative, and to do more than to think more strategically about the business and be more value add and these are all things we like to do. We like to be more creative, and kind of be more thinking about the job rather than kind of just being the doers a lot of the time.

So I’ll start with the jobs of repetitive and the other thing is, you know, if you do this in a very inexpensive way so you don’t necessarily have to hire a full time person to come in and do a particular role. I mean, you have now this whole virtual workforce online such as through my website, freelancer.com, literally any job you can possibly think of, you can actually hire someone to do it.

And I’ll give you an example. So my mom runs a wholesale business. It’s a small business that sells some arts and crafts and textiles and glues, and so forth, and paints to shops all around Australia. And she’s getting all of it. And you know, she’s not computer literate at all. But you know, all business today sell through a website in one way, shape, or form, or you find your customers online, or you contact them online.

And so, I got her a virtual assistant that actually was trained as a programmer, it wasn’t, you know, and they were basically a stay at home mother of two who were living, she was living in Sri Lanka. And when my mum would get to work in the morning, the link would jump online.

And she had all the customer queries and you’re emailing back and forth and so forth, update the website with new photos for products and descriptions and so on. Do the customer newsletters, this, that, the other end really took a whole load off my mind every day to work. So she could free herself up and do other things.

And that was fairly inexpensive. I mean, I think for that was something around $350 a month. You could hire a full-time virtual assistant and had some rudimentary sort of programming skills to kind of help you kind of run a website and that sort of thing is completely invaluable in terms of being able to kind of take your business to the next level.