This Smart Guide is meant as a starting point for you and your business to use as a baseline framework. It's the framework I've used to build numerous businesses and how my current business, Staff.com, uses to train our clients on how to optimize outsourcing within their companies.

Depending on your product/service and industry you will need to add to this guide and can take personalized notes along the way.

It can and should serve both outsourcing newcomers and veterans as a great reference guide and as you work through the process time and time again.

The first section, Becoming More Productive, will focus on an often ignored aspect of outsourcing: your current productivity and organization levels. Just as larger companies organize and streamline their activities and business processes before automating and outsourcing, you too have to better define different areas of your business and personal outputs. This will save you time, money, sanity and much more further into the process.

The next section, How To Source Talent, will introduce you to the newest and most trustworthy platforms that have been developed and used by millions of businesses since Tim Ferriss first wrote his book. I'll show you how to define your company needs, how to craft a compelling job description to attract world-class talent and what the overall (recommended) process should be when looking to hire.

The third section, The Interview Process, will dive deeper into the nuts and bolts of how to run effective interviews. Since you'll most likely be interviewing someone over the phone or through a video service, I'll point out what qualities you should be looking for, what questions to ask, and how to setup a trial phase to make sure both parties are satisfied before anything becomes permanent (if this is what you're looking for. The same process can apply to temporary freelancers).

The four section, Communicating With Remote Employees, will walk you through tools and processes to ensure that your remote workers deliver high quality work and that you both remain connected. Communication is often the biggest difference in performance and final output.

The fifth section is dedicated to Process Design. This will help walk you though the theory of how to design, build, and implement effective business processes to help make your business more effective.

The last section, Building Redundant Processes, will focus on actually applying the theory from the last section to help you create processes that will streamline your operations and make automation of simple or repetitive tasks possible.