I think I am a pretty rare breed amongst sales reps in our industry. I can sell AND I can handle the details when it comes to back office work like proofs from factories, reconciling the supplier bills, accounting, payroll and general customer service.

The problem is I HATE dealing with the parts of the business that don’t make me money. And as you may recall, I make my money by focusing on increasing my total gross profit dollar volume. This involves sales, business development and being out with the clients and prospects.

When I ran my own distributorship, I was spending 75%+ of my time on the things that distracted me from the sales and didn’t make me money … employee issues, cash flow challenges and general back office administrative tasks that seemed to be never ending. So, almost 10 years ago I decided to outsource my back office.

Sure I could handle all the work myself and keep 100% of the gross profits. But I hated doing it. And I couldn’t figure out how to make the cash flow work, no matter how hard I tried.

My theory (which proved to be correct) was that if I could free myself up to focus on the parts of the business I loved (selling, training and coaching) and hand off the rest, I would generate more sales and gross profit dollars. Ultimately making me more money AND helping me find enjoyment and fun in this business.

By outsourcing the back office, it has freed me up to be super focused on my clients and implement best practices for growing my sales and my business. It also has freed up my schedule to allow me time to “think” and try new strategies for growth. It’s afforded me the freedom of schedule and “bandwidth” to create. Thus giving my clients/prospects better ideas for their promotional needs, giving my licensees better ideas and angles for opening doors and closing deals, and last but certainly not least, giving me the idea for building a residual income model for the promotional products business.