Have you ever played the game Age of Empires? Well… honestly, neither have I. But, I have sat beside my husband for many hours watching him play and understand the game pretty well. If you’ve never seen this game at all, here’s how it works.

Your goal is to build your tribe into an empire. You are given a limited amount of resources like a few people, some food, houses. It’s pretty neat really because you start by building a small village. In order to grow or sustain the village, you need to feed your people. So you direct some of your village people to farm the land. As you farm, you build up a lot of food and you’ll find you need a place to store them so you have to build a grain silo.

At this point, you can either direct some farmers to build the silo or you get a new villager. But, each villager will cost you so much food, a house and so on. In other words, in exchange for labor, you have to spend some resources. Say you spend it and now you have more than enough food to feed your people but you have a new problem. Neighboring tribes/empires are attacking you, trying to steal your food. So now you have to build an army. Each person in your army cost you resources as well. As my husband put it, you have to spend your resources wisely in order to survive and grow your empire.

But there’s a catch. If you don’t get your people to start farming, they will eat up all the food and your empire dies. If you don’t spend enough resources to build silos and whatever your city needs, you’ll have other problems e.g. not enough people to defend your city your neighbors plunder you and your empire dies as well.

So what is Lynette really driving at? My point is, this empire is like a business. If you want to grow your company, you need labor. In fact, labor is a requirement. People are the most precious resource of any business. Huge companies like Google exist because of their people. Labor is the one thing that will help you generate more products or more content – the same way more farmers give you more food in the game. The faster or more content/products we can output, the faster we will grow. So, I know that’s a simplistic view of economics of business but you more or less know what I’m getting at here.

The bottom line is, to grow, we need to leverage other people’s time and skill. Which translates to – outsourcing. If you resist this, you’ll grow slowly or maybe not at all. Many marketers hawk stuff to you daily, claiming you must get this product today or your business will die a sad death tomorrow. I know this probably sounds the same thing to you. But there is a difference. It is not marketing spin, it is just the way business works and has worked since time immemorial.

If you wish you could clone yourself to complete your work, you know what? You can! Outsource it. When I started outsourcing, I didn’t really have money pay someone to begin with. But I saved up to buy a 10 hour retainer package. Then I got busy doing the stuff I wish I had time to do while my assistant worked on stuff I did. Next month, I didn’t have enough for 10 hours so my assistant and I negotiated 5 hours, 2 hours whatever. Small, baby steps.

Are you ready to get started but feel overwhelmed about the whole process? Then check out the outsourcing resources Alice Seba created. All free. Click here to download, no email required. But before you go, let me know your thoughts on this subject.