My name is Eric Mitchell Porat and I’m an online entrepreneur, co-founder of three successful companies, and a website investor. The online world has completely changed compared to when I started more than 10 years ago. It is great to be able to learn virtually anything for free and being able to access all kinds of information at any time, but I’ve seen many people spending too much time doing something they are not experts in instead of focusing on their business and hiring a professional.
It is important to always learn new skills that can help you understand your business better, but this doesn’t mean that, as a business owner, you should do everything yourself. Doing everything yourself is good when you’re just starting out and you need to learn as much as possible, but there comes a time when it makes more sense to hire a professional.
How can hiring experts save my money?
There are two concepts we need to understand for this to make sense.
First is the concept of “resource”. The official definition is – “resource is a productive factor required to accomplish an activity”, simply put – something you can use to reach a business objective (e.g. a working website, a piece of content, a nice design, a final product). As an online entrepreneur, it is important to stop thinking in terms of money and start thinking in terms of resources. The two most important resources we have as individuals are capital (money) and time.
The second concept that’s important to understand is “Opportunity cost”. In simple terms, it’s the benefit not received as a result of not selecting the second-best option.
Now, if we combine the concepts of resource and opportunity cost, it should be easier to understand why hiring a professional is cheaper in the long-term. As a website owner or entrepreneur, you have a specific set of skills like finding a good niche, monetization, driving traffic. While you may have experience with coding and fixing technical issues on the website, is it the best way to invest your “resource” (i.e. time)? Probably not. You are much better off finding a developer that will fix the technical issues, while you invest your “resource” in finding new opportunities to grow your business. While the developer’s time is an expense for your business in the short-term, investing your time into growing your website or any other business will cover this expense in the long-term. Eric Porat can help you to understand this concept in brief.
Trying to save money was a mistake I’ve made in the first year of my journey, and I ended up realizing that, while my expenses were really low, my business wasn’t growing at all. Instead of looking for new ways to grow my website’s traffic and revenue, researching competitors, and building relationships with advertisers, I was spending most of my time working on trivial tasks like creating content, designing pages, fixing technical issues.
Since I realized what was holding me back, I was able to scale my business and work on other projects. Since 2011, I have spent more than $240,000 hiring freelancers on Upwork only, this has allowed me to free up my schedule and actually focus on growing my businesses by making the most of my time.
