If you're a small business owner, like myself, you understand how important it is to have a reliable and trustworthy team to help you run your day-to-day operations. Unfortunately, even with the additional productivity that additional employees can provide for your business, there is an increasingly large amount of time that needs to be spent on the daily management of those resources.

If it fits your business model, Outsourcing is one great way to minimize your labor costs and to maximize your return-on-investment...both in real dollar terms and also in terms of your allocation of management time.

There are many inexpensive, web-based tools available today that can provide you with a real time application to systematize and document your business processes, which can then be used on an ongoing basis to answer many of the frequently asked questions that typically take up your time...

However, with today's current group of communication tools like web-based chat, email, phone, twitter, facebook, and others, you can quickly become overwhelmed with the sheer volume of interactions and employee questions that you have to respond to on a daily basis.

As you begin to outsource your projects, you'll have multiple projects going on, and multiple providers, and you may be choosing one, or more, provider for each project. You'll also have them working on a variety of tasks. So, you want to be as efficient and effective as you can be for interacting back and forth with them.

The number one time waster that you need to avoid is chat applications. It's a great way to interact back and forth with the providers on a daily basis, but, I highly recommend that you inform them by email when you are going to be available on chat, and not leave your chat open all day long. Because you'll find is, many times you have providers that you use for one project, and then you don't have any more work for them. Well, if they are on Gmail, they can see that you are online and every time they see you online they will follow up for more and more work each time.

You might not want that so, what I do is, go invisible on Gmail, and, if there is a provider who has a question, provide them my email and my chat but they are still not able to see when I am online. If there is a problem, they can email me and we can hook up on chat.

I interact with them and when they are finished I go back to invisible. It's just like leaving your email client open all day long. If you are trying to make any progress whatsoever you close your email client, and only check it a few times a day. It is a tremendous time sucker. So, chat applications, don't have them on all the time, be offline or invisible. But, do agree to interact through email or phone.

If you take the time to systematize and document your business processes, you can take full advantage of all the enormous benefits that outsourcing can provide...