Continuing from Post I in this series, I’d like to talk more about outsourcing your ‘tech’ related work non-locally. It can actually be very beneficial when you’re just starting your business and cash is tight.

(non-locally in this case means outsourcing anywhere in the world where you cannot meet your contractor face-to-face).

Now, although I don’t work with non-local programmers; I, at times, work with non-local administrative contractors (someone who does busy work, such as article submissions or data entry) and graphic artists.

In this post I want to provide some key tools, tips and processes I use to make communication with my non-local contractors as painless and productive as possible.

How to Make a Virtual Meeting Seem ‘Real’

When hiring non-locally, it’s important to make your meetings as productive as possible. If you leave the meeting with any misunderstandings, it can often take longer than usual to get things resolved due to time zone issues.

Therefore, you must do everything you can to make sure that you both leave the meeting room 100% clear on what progress has been made, and what the next steps are.

I use two tools in tandem to accomplish this: Skype (for Audio) and GoToMeeting (for Visual).

With a Skype account, you can call pretty much anywhere in the world for little or no cost. So, grab a headset, get a Skype account, and make a habit of conducting your meetings through your Skype account. You’ll save a lot of money on phone bills.

Secondly, grab a GoToMeeting account. It’s truly an amazing tool.

It allows you to conduct live meetings online where all attendees can see your computer screen. You can also make any attendee in the meeting a “presenter” so that you can see their screen. You can even take control of their mouse and control their computer!

There is just no substitution for this level of collaboration. It will make things so much easier on you - trust me.

As of this writing, a GoToMeeting account is $50/month. If you’re on a tighter budget, you can also use a solution called TeamViewer. It lacks the stability and flexiblity of GoToMeeting, but still contains most of the core features you’ll need to do effective presentations, including screensharing and changing presenters.

It’s always important, especially when outsourcing non-locally, to make sure everyone leaves the meeting on the same page.

I do a few things to make sure this is happens:

1. Always ask your contractor to summarize the meeting before hanging up, and to also send you a document outlining the main points of the conversation.

(This brings up yet another tool that I use - HighRise. It’s an easy way to store and manage all of your contacts and to track all of your correspondence with them.)

2. Each time you end a meeting, find the contact record in HighRise for the person you just met with. Type out a quick summary of what was said and what the next steps are. Also, be sure to upload the summary document that your contractor sent you into HighRise.

Lastly…I’m going to tell you about my secret weapon for staying organized and balancing multiple projects and contractors without going absolutely mad!

It’s called Basecamp.

It’s a subscription-based, project-management tool that will organize and track anything and everything related to your projects, and it comes from the creators of HighRise.

I won’t go into how to use basecamp in this post — it’s really quite straightforward and you can learn how to use it literally in just a few minutes.

Just know that it’s an indisepnsable tool when it comes to managing your projects, and your team.

It also adds a level of professionalism to how you operate, which your contractors can visibly see. When you show them Basecamp, they’ll know you mean business! This is important because long-distance contractors can sometimes become fearful that they won’t be paid.

The more you can show them that you mean business and will treat them fairly and professionally, the better off you’ll be.