At the recent Colorado Translators Association mid-year conference, a few of us got to talking about tasks that we outsource and services that we pay for. This got me thinking about what types of services we freelancers a) can and b) should be outsourcing or paying for.
It’s important to realize that having the proper tools and services for your business costs money. Running a freelance business entails a lot less overhead than running, say, a restaurant, but if you try to operate on zero overhead, your business will suffer. I’ll give you a list of services that I either outsource or pay for, and then I’m interested to hear what you have to say too.
A task is ripe for outsourcing/paying money for if:
- You hate it, are terrible at it, and therefore avoid it (mine: accounting)
- It provides you with information that would be time-consuming or impossible to obtain on your own (mine: Payment Practices)
- It generates way more income than what you pay for the service (mine: E-Junkie)
- You can hire someone who is much better at the task than you are (mine: graphic design and screencast videos)
- It saves you a lot of time and hassle (mine: Adobe PDF conversion service)
- It lets you bring in an additional revenue stream ( mine: MailChimp e-mail list)
- It protects your business against disaster (mine: SugarSync online backup service)
The tasks and services that I currently outsource, and their approximate costs, are listed below. Note that these are not affiliate links, just services I love.
- Accounting: my accountant does my quarterly payroll taxes and year-end corporate tax return. About $1,000 per year.
- Subscription to Payment Practices so that I can vet agencies before I work with them. About $20 per year.
- Subscription to SugarSync to fully back up my laptop hard drive every time I connect to the Internet, in case my laptop is lost/stolen/falls out of my bike bag and gets run over by a bus. About $75 per year.
- Basic membership to E-Junkie, so that I can sell PDF copies of my book directly from my website with automatic downloads. $5 per month.
- Graphic designer to do website banners, book covers, etc. Cost depends on the project, about $600 per year.
- Instructional designer to make screencast videos for my online courses. About $500 per course.
- Adobe’s online PDF conversion service, which works really well on really lousy PDFs. About $25 per year.
- MailChimp mailing list service so that I can send out my weekly e-newsletter. $25 per month.
I also have various other paid pieces of software: an MP3 recording service for Skype calls, a scanner program so that I can still use my really old scanner, etc.
All of these services add up to a fairly substantial cost; but I also think that far too many translators think that “if it costs money, I’m not buying it,” which is a short-sighted way to run a business. If there’s a tool that helps you work better, or that frees up your time so that you can do what you’re good at while someone else does what they’re good at, I think it’s almost always worth buying.
It’s also important to think about the consequences of not having a particular tool or service. I don’t work with that many agencies, but since a Payment Practices membership costs less than a minimum charge, it’s clearly a good investment. In 13 years of freelancing, I’ve never had a major computer failure, partially because I’m pretty scrupulous about upgrading my main work computer every two to three years, but for $75 a year, I’m not risking what would happen if my laptop were stolen from my co-working office, or if I spilled coffee all over it. Those situations fall into the category of “penny wise, pound foolish” and every freelancer should avoid that!
Readers: over to you…what do you outsource or pay for?
D. van de Weerd says
Hello Corinne, thank you for your post. I translate deeds and other legal documents on a regular basis. They are often scanned by the client and sent as a PDF file. Does Adobe’s online PDF conversion service convert these kind of PDF’s to Word? If so, I would definitely outsource this. Thanks in advance. Danielle
Corinne McKay says
Thanks Danielle! Yes, that’s what it does, and it works well even with manually scanned documents, which many other PDF converters do not.
Amy Lesiewicz says
Is Adobe’s online PDF conversion service secure? Will using it violate NDAs?
Corinne McKay says
They do not store your documents, but I also would not use it for anything highly confidential or which is covered by an NDA. I use Trados’ PDF converter (installed on my computer) for that, and it works pretty well!
D. van de Weerd says
Thank you, Corinne. Good point, Amy. I better install a PDF converter on my computer as well, for confidential documents.
Corinne McKay says
Yes, I think Amy makes a good point. Very little of my work is highly confidential (in fact a lot of it is things like corporate communications and development reports that are *intended* for public distribution), but for anything even remotely confidential, I don’t let it leave my hard drive.
Maria van der Heijde-Zomerdijk says
Cleaning service! Nothing makes me more nervous than a messy/dirty house. I straighten out the various rooms before our cleaning services comes, and they work through the whole house in 2 hours. Cost: $100 per two weeks. For me, worth every penny!
Corinne McKay says
Good point about services that are not directly work-related! My service like that is my gym membership; $80 a month is a lot cheaper than health problems from sitting all day!
ciclistatraduttore says
I also outsourced the gym and the house cleaners in Charlottesville also, before moving to my current life on the road! I did not claim either as a business cost, but they were crucial to my productivity.
Corinne McKay says
Agree: I cannot tax-deduct my gym membership, but I see it as a business expense. The “cost” of doing a job that I love but that entails sitting for most of the day!
bzayas says
This was so informative, Corinne! When I first decided to go into this field I did it because of, first, my love for languages in general, and second, because honestly there isn’t much you really need to purchase/invest to get started. However, the deeper I get into it and the more I learn from you and other linguists in the field, the more I’ve realized what you’re discussing here today. Little by little I just have to trust other professionals and stop thinking that I’m actually saving money by not outsourcing activities that do take a lot of time. Thanks for the insight!
Corinne McKay says
In one sense, you’re correct that the up-front investment is very low. You certainly don’t need to take a business loan to start out as a freelance translator. But here’s an example of a conversation that I find frustrating.
Freelancer: “Ugh! An agency owes me a ton of money and isn’t paying!”
Me: “What’s their name? I’ll check them out on Payment Practices. Hmm…looks like they have a rating of 1 out of 5, so that’s very unfortunate, but not actually surprising that they didn’t pay you. You didn’t check them on Payment Practices?”
Freelancer: “Uh…no, I let my membership expire because I thought it was kind of expensive and I don’t use it that much.”
That really puzzles me.
Elisabeth Maurland says
Thank you for this list. I think I asked you this exact thing during the course I took from you, and it’s nice to see it in list form, black on white.
I use MailChimp too, but the free version, which has served me quite well. I am not sure what the paid service covers that the free one doesn’t.
Corinne McKay says
Thanks Elisabeth! I think MailChimp fees are purely a function of how many people you have on your list; I don’t think I paid at all until 2,000 subscribers, then it goes up in increments of about $5 per month. But definitely worth it!
andiehotranslations says
I will be hiring a native French speaker to do my sales in France for me. (Let me know if you have any good candidates!)
Marketing in English is stressful enough, but doing it in French (during French business hours, no less) gives me the vapors just thinking about it. I think this task falls under just about every category you mention above.
Corinne McKay says
Thanks Andie! That sounds really interesting…let me know how it goes, or maybe you can write a guest post about it??
Tess Whitty (@Tesstranslates) says
Hi Corinne! Thanks for writing about this and I know I discussed outsourcing with you. Heck, I have a part time VA these days and absolutely love it. There is nothing better than to wake up and someone has done 4 hours of work for you already. Just a quick note. You can set up e-books and get paid through Paypal directly from a wordpress site these days, without going through another service, but perhaps e-Junkie provides more service?
Here are things I outsource these days:
– Accounting and book keeping – I only enter invoices and check off payments, plus send out payment reminders these days, the rest is done by my accountant
– House cleaning
– Website design
– Graphic design
– Podcast editing and creation of show notes
– Market research
– SEO
– Email list program (Aweber)
– Video editing
– Transcription of podcasts
– Editing of articles and blog posts
Corinne McKay says
Awesome, thanks Tess! Yes, I didn’t want to put you on the spot, but I hoped you would chime in about your virtual assistant! Very cool.
InMyOwnTerms says
I paid someone to redesign my blog. It´s true that you can do your own work and learn wordpress, and I did, but there was a point when I thought I couldn’t improve it because I didn’t have the skills. Better leave it to a professional. Worth every penny!
Corinne McKay says
So true, thank you for pointing that out! We all have to work within our budgets, which are not unlimited. But when I hire someone to do skilled tasks like web design, graphic design, screencast videos etc. for me, it is *always* better than what I would bootstrap myself. We translators are often better at giving the “hire a professional” advice than at taking it, but it still bears repeating!!
Oscar says
Very interesting post! Thanks!
Corinne McKay says
Thank you!
Claire-Marie Dubois says
Thanks for this very interesting post! All those tips and tools are definitely going to be very helpful to the beginner that I am.
Corinne McKay says
Great, glad you enjoyed it!
Francesca Gatenby says
Hi Corinne,
many thanks for these recommendations. I have a question re SugarSync: it sounds like a very helpful and streamlined service, but I often work with confidential docs and assume it would breach my confidentiality obligations if I back up to a server system I don’t intrinsically own. Do you ask your clients’ permission first or, because your work ought to be your intellectual property, consider it therefore your decision as to how you back it up?
Another query is whether, by backing up remotely, this affects file structure – i.e. older Trados TMs won’t open if the file path has changed, so am not sure whether this is retained? Do you happen to know about this?
I back up my computer regularly to an external hard drive. It’s time-consuming, always slightly out of date and cumbersome, but I retain full ownership of the data, so it seems like my safest option at present. Always interested in exploring other options, however!
Thanks,
Francesca
Corinne McKay says
Thanks Francesca! Good questions, and definitely food for a full blog post there! My thoughts:
-I comply scrupulously with all NDAs, but it’s also important to remember that the vast majority of clients are *sending you* their files via regular e-mail, which is neither encrypted nor secure. SugarSync uses a secure connection and stores your files in an encrypted format, so I feel confident in that, although I do not work on highly confidential documents like pre-release financial information or pre-filing patent information or anything like that. But again (off-topic but just an interesting question), it would be worth asking, if you have clients whose NDAs are so restrictive that they prohibit encrypted online backups, why is the client not using a PGP key or an encrypted file transfer service to send you the documents (unless they are already doing that)?
-I don’t use my online backups for real-time access (only to restore a file, or to work on a file when I’m not at my own computer), so I’m not sure about the file path issue. In SugarSync, you just designate the folders that you want it to scan for new documents (for example I do My Documents and Pictures), and then it copies those folder structures directly.
I agree about external hard drive versus a syncing service (I used to copy everything onto a high-capacity flash drive). The external thing works, but you have to remember to do it, and it’s not going to save you if your house or office floods, burns down, etc. Also, syncing services are really helpful for other things; for example you can create a public link to a file so that anyone with the link can download it. I often do that for my clients in Europe when they need something for first thing in the morning their time. I’ll e-mail them the file, but then give them a public link to the SugarSync file in case there’s some complication with the e-mail, which saves them from waiting until I first check e-mail at around 3 PM their time.
ciclistatraduttore says
In the past, I have outsourced graphic design to produce my yellow “Now you are speaking my language!” buttons. Otherwise, my outsourcing has matched yours at one time or another. I do my own accounting and taxes, but I did retain an accounting service for many years while the firm had employees. She did the payroll and the State and Federal taxes and reporting. Worth every dime ($80/month).
Even today, I outsource administrative support.
When I lived in Charlottesville, I started with a part-time employee. She kept the paper filed and other “housekeeping” tasks of every business: phone, callbacks, printing, shipping, etc. She was also a great monolingual editor. Then she retired to play with her grandkids, and I took her on as an Independent Contractor for occasional work.
When I left Charlottesville to work on the road, I retained the services of Bright Business Solutions, which is a one-woman firm in Charlottesville. Her main job is to check the PO box, but she also deposits checks that come in the mail and forwards important mail to me. She also fulfills orders for paper copies of my booklets.
The numbers back up what you wrote. In my case, overhead in 2002 (70%) dropped to 33% when I took on the accounting service and the admin assistant.
Thanks for this post.
Jonathan
Corinne McKay says
Very interesting, thanks Jonathan! Also interesting to see whether it’s more cost-effective in the end to take someone on as a part-time employee rather than as a contractor. Definitely something I’ve considered; for example if I could find someone with good website skills who could also do basic financial tasks. That sounds very helpful that you have a US-based admin person while you’re freewheeling!
Maryam Abdi says
I’m glad you brought this topic up Corinne. If I’m not capable of doing the task or I just don’t want to do it, I’ll outsource it. For me, it was hiring an accountant (saving me more money and time) and outsourcing graphic design work.
Corinne McKay says
Thanks Maryam! Yes, those are two things that I have stopped touching as well (due to an absolute lack of talent, much less the inclination!!).
Victoria Patience says
Thanks for this! In my experience the shift in mindset from “spending” (or even “wasting”) money on outsourcing to “investing” is one of the hardest steps in freelancing… But one of the most important. As with many decisions that we resist for irrational reasons, I’ve found that having some kind of objective criteria for making the call is really helpful. In this case, having an idea of your hourly rate and knowing how much you could be making translating instead of doing accounting/designing makes it easy to decide whether it’s worth your while. Another argument in favor of doing all those hours/expenses/words per hour sums (which I only forced myself to do after reading your book, by the way!)
There is another aspect to it, too: I sometimes groan at the websites of freelancers (well, and huge companies, too) in other industries that have not been translated by professional translators, often leading to dire results. The person/company in question clearly thought they could do it well enough themselves, so why outsource? There seems to be an inherent contradiction in we translators getting frustrated over people failing to recognize the value and quality of a good translator, but then thinking that our own web design skills are good enough not to outsource. Of course, we are a multitalented bunch and some translators probably are also skilled designers etc., but you get my point. And in the same way that the non-translator translating their own website doesn’t realize how bad the result is, we probably don’t realize how home-made our websites look to a professional designer, or pick up all the flaws in our accounting that a CPA might notice. Outsourcing implies supporting and recognizing the skill of another qualified professional and thus being part of the larger freelancing community or the service industry/creative economy in general.
And like translation, with these kinds of services you often get what you pay for. My partner and I are redesigning our site at present at have got two wildly varying design quotes, and though I know it will be tempting to go with the cheaper one, the work of the more expensive designer is much more stylish…
In other words, I think we should try to measure other services with the same ruler that we would like potential clients to use to measure us.
One final note, this is not exactly about outsourcing but it is about investing part of your earnings in a service: the best thing I ever did was to join forces with another translator in my language pair (I’m the native English speaker, she’s the native Spanish speaker) and proofread ALL of each other’s work. True, dividing the per-word rate at first means that you are earning less, but we soon made up for that loss by being able to get better paying clients who appreciated the quality of the final product (and that extra pair of eyes really does make a difference).
Thanks again, this kind of nuts-and-bolts practical advice is really helpful.
Corinne McKay says
Thank you so much! Great ideas!
hbehl says
Great topic as usual, Corinne.
Off the top of my head, here are a few other things I find worth paying for:
remote administrative assistance;
premium versions of reference apps (usually they allow me to download the content to my phone for when my data signal is too weak, and remove battery-wasting ads);
wifi hotspot service (for working on the road with a *secure* network–free public wifi is bad news for sensitive documents);
international mobile voice/data service (allows me to take and make calls as usual and stay on top of emails);
Grasshopper virtual voicemail service;
Quick books online (I used a combination of several decent freeware programs for years but once I converted to QB I really kicked myself for trying to “save” those $30/month–I hate bookkeeping and the less integrated solutions just make it take longer and be more of a hassle);
Adobe CC (gives me Acrobat Pro plus photo and video editing software).
Corinne McKay says
Excellent examples, thanks Holly!
Cathy Bellerose says
It’s nice to read you Corinne! I am new to the freelance business since January of this year, and I sometimes get overwhelmed with all there is to do. I am a resourceful person and I like to learn to do things on my own when I can, but I clearly cannot take care of all aspects of my business. I was able to build my business website and do the bookkeeping myself, but I am definitely hiring a financial advisor to look at my investments and to plan for the future. I’m also thinking of getting help for my marketing strategy. There are so many tools and options out there that I don’t know where to look first!
Thank you for your this post!