As Ive prepped over the past nine months to launch my RIA, I found there are some things Im happy doing myself., but there are other things Im more than happy paying someone else to do.
If done myself, I may have been able to do a somewhat decent job at the task, but it would have taken me so much longer to do.
Take this week for example: One of my tasks is to prepare materials for my first newsletter. People have been signing up on the Finance for Teachers website to receive updates, and also on the companys Facebook page.
Now the Facebook page is easy, as I will just put posts on there or link straight from my company blog page. However, the newsletter needs design and I dont like distributing things that look half-done or quickly put together.
My newsletter uses AWeber as its contact collection and distribution software. AWeber (and there are others) allows you to build a form on your website to collect contact details and then it will automatically pull the content from your blog and send it in email format to the people who have signed up.
Now this email can look cookie-cutter in a simple template form, straight text, or you can custom build your own style. I didnt like any of the template designs, as they werent as customizable as I would like. So I found someone to do build one for me.
He lives in India, I dont know his name, hes a wizard at HTML and I paid him $100 to design my newsletter template. He built it within a day, its fully branded using my colors, I was able to tell him to shift things here and there, and hell install it for me. All of that work would have taken me hours, if I even knew how to code in HTML. The hours I would have had to spend are far more valuable than $100, so I decided to pay someone to do the work for me.
Dave Grant, CFP, a Financial Planning columnist, is the founder of Cary, Ill.-based planning firm Finance for Teachers. Hes also the founder of Fee Only Consulting, which focuses on developing the skills of Gen Y planners. In addition, hes the founder of NAPFA Genesis, a networking group for young, fee-only planners.
