If you think I’m about to suggest you sign up to a tipster service, you’re wrong.
A few years ago I read The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris and it changed my perception of business, money and time forever. It’s almost become a cliche to to have read this book as if you take a look in any entrepreneur related forum, you will find plenty of people banging on about it. Most of them will never take action on the suggestions in the book and the rest won’t even read it because the title sounds more ridiculous than that of this post.
In the book, Tim Ferris talks about how he created a health product called BrainQuicken. He aimed to automate as much of the business as possible by paying other companies to build and ship the product. He hired virtual assistants to deal with customer support and reply and organise hundreds of daily emails. The idea was that after the initial work involved in setting the business up, he would be able to run it (and keep the profits) whilst only working 4 hours per week. He actually ended up selling the business for a considerable sum of money.
Think about it. When was the last time you saw the CEO of any major company get involved with the basic, daily activities that are essential to keep business running? Does the CEO of Tesco stack shelves and count how many tins of beans are in the warehouse? I don’t think so.
You need to decide how much your time is worth. Say, if you make £15 an hour at work, why are you spending hours every week putting football results in a spreadsheet when you can pay someone £5 an hour to do exactly that? You’re basically throwing away £10 an hour. Wouldn’t you rather spend that time with your family, playing Fifa, or both!?!?
How can you automate your betting?
Here’s a real-life example. You probably know already that I love to bet on eSports. Unfortunately because eSports is so new, there are limited resources to find team and player statistics. Unlike Football, there’s no site where I can pay £20 a month and get a tonne of good information in seconds.
Luckily, there are plenty of people out there who will find this information for me and email the results whilst I sleep. All for an extremely low cost. It will take you 20 seconds to Google “Virtual Assistants” and find someone in the Philippines who will happily do this for $5 an hour. Using virtual assistants for this kind of work easily saves me 10 hours a week. I can choose to take that time off or use it to work on something that actually earns good money.
I’ve heard a few funny stories about people who paid a VA to do their job for them. Their employees had no idea and one guy actually got a promotion! Obviously I wouldn’t advise doing this, but it’s interesting to hear about.
Betting Software
Arguably the easiest way to save time and money is to make use of readily available software. I know a lot people who read this blog use programs such as Bet Angel to record data into an Excel sheet. I also know a lot of people who refuse to pay for the software but spend hours and hours a week pissing away their life, typing it all in manually!
The trick with software is to only buy what you genuinely need. Think about where you are wasting a lot of time and buy software that will fix that. Don’t just go window shopping for a shiny subscription service that promises to double your bank in 10 days. If there’s no software available that does the job you need, hire a virtual assistant to build it for you!
One final note
The picture in this post is from a weekend break to Amsterdam in 2014, about 3 years ago now. You can imagine, I had a pretty good time. Admittedly, I still had a real job back then but I would spend my evenings and weekends working on my own projects. I would not have been able to take that time off or pay for the trip if I hadn’t used virtual assistants and software to streamline my businesses. Ultimately, this change in approach to business, time and money has changed my life for the better. I highly encourage you to think about how you can do the same.
How have you streamlined your betting process? It would be great to share ideas… Comment below 🙂
Laurence
I read the 4 hour work week 4 or 5 years ago and got some great ideas from it but sadly never did anything with it..
I’m now both interested in bet-trading, little bit in Forex (still studying) and working on opening up a web-store around my hoppy and I want to outsource some work for that
It would be great to learn more from you about this and maybe pick your brain a bit on what and how you’ve used your VA
Cheers
Hey Runar,
Thank’s for getting in touch. It sounds like we have a few similar interests! The first thing to do is to write a list of ALL the things that could possibly be outsourced. It’s much harder than it looks as we’re so used to doing everything ourselves. It’s hard to let go, but it’s much better in the long run if done properly.
Imagine you are an apprentice working for yourself. What would your boss have you working on? That’s what you should outsource.
Like anything, there is a lot of trial and error involved. It takes a while to find the right people to work on your projects. It also takes a while to realise that cheaper hourly rates often cost more in the long run.
Feel free to use the contact form on my site to ask specific questions if there’s anything you need help with.
Cheers 🙂
Laurence
Yes that’s what I’ve been looking at things as well, I almost outsourced a lot of stuff around one of my property projects in 2015
Now I just need to write down what can be outsourced for my new project
Have a great weekend, I’ll keep in contact