DIY or do we buy?

Being at Proakatemia one has at least two roles. Entrepreneur and Student. We do business and we are here to learn about different aspects of business and can choose our focus quite freely. There are many situations where we have the choice: DIY or do we buy? Do we hire someone to do the accounting, or do we do it ourselves, do we hire someone to build a webpage or do we do it ourselves. Depending on the choice, one trades learning, quality, money, or time for each other.

As one starts a company there are obviously limitations on money and, as students, we are here to learn about things we don’t know yet about, those two points often make a strong case for DIY but one can easily get stuck in frustration when doing everything within the team.

I personally tend to DIY.  I’m happy to pay for something that I need but if I think that I can do it with a similar quality myself, I’m very quick to try and sometimes reluctant to outsourcing. As teenagers my brother and me cut each other’s hair, I don’t pay for getting my tires changed, I rather design a webpage myself than pay someone else to do it. For me, money vs time is one consideration, but I also have this initial curiosity to go for DIY, I love learning and it has given me a very wide skillset. We stopped the haircutting because it became clear that the results are not the same, I still create simple webpages myself, but if I want to increase quality, I rather pay for someone to do it better instead of struggling myself.

Back to business. There comes a point where too much DIY harms the development of the business and prohibits growth. But where is that point? Every situation is different but knowing what your time is worth and where your time is worth the most is key. Knowing is not always easy. I started to wonder where this point is because I just built an excel sheet for our team’s finances which we could have bought. It would have saved much frustration and I could have spent the time on things I get better results at. Knowing where the line is has much to do with knowing your skills, priorities and about time management. Donald Miller says it like this: “One of the keys to accomplishing more of the right objectives is to know what those objectives are and then know what your highest return opportunities are and to prioritise those above all others.” (Miller 2021)

While “DIY or do we buy” is a consideration of money, it is also a question about focus and knowing where to focus to get results. I need to know what I want to learn for my student role, and I need to know where to get business results for my entrepreneurship role, obviously they overlap, but knowing my goals will help to decided whether to outsource, delegate or do it myself. Proakatemia is a very lively place, and it comes with many distractions, same with the team process. If one does not have clear goals and is not able to prioritise them, likely, there will be little results at the end of the time at Proakatemia. Same is true for the opposite.

Source:

Miller, D. 2021. Business Made Simple, Harper Collins Leadership. 54.