When I quit my job 7 years ago to go freelance as a web designer, I thought I was finally free. But what I soon realized was I actually didn’t have nearly as much freedom as I thought I would.

After my first year of freelancing, it dawned on me:  I’m not making money when I’m not at my computer, billing for my time. Even as I raised my rates, I found it was difficult to level up my business when I’m the only one doing all of the work.

I thought, maybe it’s time to start growing my team and scaling up. So I began to outsource some of my work. And that’s when I ran into trouble…

Common outsourcing pitfalls

I slammed into many of the same pitfalls that most freelancers run up against when they begin to outsource for the first time. If you’ve dealt with any of these, then let me tell you: you’re not alone!

Pitfall 1: It’s faster to just do it myself

Almost every time I delegated a task to someone I hired early on, it only took a day before I backtracked and just did it myself.  Sure, the task got done, but I was back in the same place I was before: w orking solo and stuck doing everything myself.

Pitfall 2: The person I hired did a poor job and/or didn’t deliver on time

In the beginning, this happened to me constantly.  A web page was not coded properly, or a PSD mockup design didn’t meet the standards I had hoped for. So I’d pay the freelancer, then re-do the work myself.  Now I’m not only doing the work myself, but I’m paying for it!

Pitfall 3: I hired someone, but I don’t have enough work to keep them busy

I was so excited to hire my first virtual assistant, so I could delegate all of the low-level tasks that take up so much of my day.  But once I brought them on, I found myself spending even more time just thinking up things to keep them busy.  That alone, made me even busier!

Over the years, I learned lots of things the hard way when it comes to outsourcing and growing your team — especially as a freelancer, bootstrapping your business from the ground up.  So for the rest of this article, I’m going to share the key lessons I learned, to help you avoid some of the same mistakes I made.

Position your service as a product

Before you can begin hiring, there’s a lot you must do to prepare. If you want to grow beyond just a one-person operation, it will require a fundamental shift in the way you approach your work, and your business.

I strongly advise freelancers who are looking to scale up, to move toward productizing your service. I don’t mean go and build the next big software product. That’s a huge leap to make, and will require lots of experience in order to gain traction. But positioning your service as a product is a much smarter first step toward growing into a more scalable business model, which can ultimately be run by a team.

When you productize your service, what you’re really doing is establishing predictability.

You’re going from taking on projects of different shapes and sizes, implementing all sorts of different solutions for different types of clients, to a more predictable, repeatable service. The more you deliver the same service, the more predictable the process is, and the easier it will be to train a team to carry out some (or all) of the tasks.

It wasn’t until I productized my service that my struggles to keep my employees busy went away. The business had clearly defined processes that needed to be carried out on a weekly basis, so it made sense to hire (and keep) people for these jobs.