One of the nice things about making money online is that it can be done with no employee overhead. It's simply not that labor intensive. Even web sites can be built with programs that makes their creation simple enough for a single human being. But if you need help with some of the side considerations (like accounting) or simply want help at some point, what do you do?

You could hire someone, but that's a massive pain and in my opinion, a grossly unnecessary hassle. If you hire employees, you have to consider:

• Benefits.
• Employment law.
• Meeting a regular payment schedule known as paying a salary.
• Dealing with subordinates if they decide they don't want to cooperate.

Fortunately, none of these are necessary to endure. None of the tasks you'll ever encounter will need a constant source of dedicated attention known as an employee. You may get the occasional necessity, which you can handle with outsourcing. This is where you go out and hire a professional or company to do something for you as a third-party contractor.

This is vastly preferable to hiring an employee because:

• You're a customer, not a boss. The business or professional you've hired will be trying to retain you as a customer so you'll pay them more money in the future. This puts you in a vastly superior position to being an employer.
• You can hire per-task. This means if you just need one thing done, you hire someone to do it, pay them, and then you're done. The person you hire in this regard then worries about finding their own future business, and there's no expectation of a constant paycheck from you.
• If the outsourced service does not perform adequately, you simply cease to use it and find another one. This is opposed to firing an employee, which is tough to do personally and can leave you searching months for a qualified replacement. This goes back to the 'customer' status as opposed to 'employer'. The employer-employee relationship is far more restricting than the customer-business one. Customers have far better options than employers when things go wrong, and you're a customer when you outsource.
• You suffer no massive additions of trouble. You don't need to balloon your overhead or burden yourself with the rigors of employment law and taxation compliance. The outsourced company worries with all that, and they're set up to deal with it already.
• You will still be helping the economy. I know you may have heard a lot of flak associated with the word 'outsourcing', but I don't mean leave the country to hire someone. Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, no service you'll ever want or need is farther away than a local phone call or a short drive from your home. There are plenty of professionals and small businesses near you if you simply look for them. When you do business with them, it means they can continue to grow and possibly employ their own personnel. So you still contribute positively to someone else's employment prospects without hanging yourself.

So someday, if you do want or need someone else to take care of something, I highly recommend you outsource. Employees are for larger organizations. As an online businessperson working for yourself, you may want one, but you'll never need one.

Ryan Ambrose is the webmaster of Financial Self-Reliance, a web site about how to actually make money online. The Nuts and Bolts section that contains this and other articles related to the practical considerations of running a home-based business can be reached directly from here. Copyright 2006, Ryan Ambrose.