assistant

Is Personal Outsourcing An Option During a Slow Economy?

Recently, my thoughts have turned towards the feasibility of keeping a virtual assistant on the job, if the economy decides to slow down a bit. If you follow this blog, you may remember that I hired a Virtual Assistant on a monthly basis back in January of 2008. It has now been a few months since then. I want to share some thoughts I have about having a Virtual Personal Assistant during a slower economy.

There are a couple of scenarios that come to mind when thinking about a slowing economy. Your job may be affected by the economy, or not. If you work in government, for example, you probably do not have to worry much about losing your job. In this case, you will not be affected much by economic slowdown and your ability to afford a Virtual Personal Assistant. If, on the other hand, your employment is sensitive to economic conditions, you may have to carefully consider continuing the services of your Virtual Personal Assistant. There are some advantages to having somebody help you when your livelihood may be affected. If you do not have the money to hire an assistant, then the point is moot.

One of the first things you learn, when you go out into the job market, is that it is much better to have a job waiting for you before you quit or get fired from your current job. We have all had that situation in which we seek, or are given, the opportunity to succeed outside the company. When there is no job waiting, you may take the first job offered, especially if you are unemployed long enough. That job offer may not be the best choice for you. The problem is, how do you get or find the good jobs if you are busy working hard at your current job?

This is where a Virtual Assistant comes into play. You can have your VA searching for job opportunities for you and submitting your resume to different companies while you work. In this way, you avoid the issue of job hunting on company time. Using your work hours to look for work tends to create a self-fulfilling prophesy; your work suffers from your job hunt and you become one of the first people to get laid off. This would not be so with a Virtual Assistant; you could focus on your current job and still have a set of eyes looking for opportunities. The only time you would actively participate in the job hunt is the occasional job interview. Like with insurance, you have to have that job waiting before disaster strikes.

If disaster has struck and you have enough savings to float you for a while, it still may not hurt to have a Virtual Assistant in your employ. Another set of eyes in your job search may help you cover more ground than you doing it yourself. You could have somebody filtering through all the opportunities and making phone calls on your behalf while you are out and about interviewing. Realistically, we tend to act like we are on vacation when we are between jobs. Your VA can pick up some of your slack.

Finally, there is another way in which a slow economy would affect your decision to hire a Virtual Personal Assistant, if you are a small business owner. The cost of hiring a full-time, or even part-time employee to perform repetitive, but necessary, tasks can often be a big decision. After all, you are paying wages, taxes, and maybe even some benefits. In an uncertain economy, you may not want the risk of adding an employee to your payroll. Virtual Assistants can add a buffer to your hiring process. You can outsource a few tasks here and there when there is demand, until you reach the point where you can sustain an additional employee.

There are perhaps plenty of other ways in which outsourcing during an economic slowdown is advantageous for individuals. I have only covered outsourcing to help you find work before or after you lose your job, and the flip side where you are the small business owner. I’m curious to learn any other ways in which outsourcing can help out individuals during an economic downturn. Please drop me an email or leave a comment with your ideas.

Outsourcing with BPOVIA Virtual Assistants


On Monday, I will be interviewing James Huang, Founder and CEO of BPOVIA.com. BPOVIA is an outsourcing company from China that offers Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), but also provides Virtual Assistant services. We will talk about what is involved with hiring a virtual assistant and what you can expect when you work with BPOVIA.

Aside from Virtual Assistants, BPOVIA offers sourcing, market development, and trade show services in China. If you have any questions about any of these services, be sure to join us from 8:30 to 9:00 AM, CST on Blog Talk Radio. You can call in to the show at 646-716-8227 or join us in the chat room.


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The Morning Show: World Wide Wednesday

You can listen to today’s show on Blog Talk Radio.

Today, we speak with Ganesh Ranganathan of IGSBookkeeping.com about outsourcing your bookkeeping needs. If you have ventured into the world of virtual assistants or are considering the move, this will be helpful in learning more about what outsourcing can do for you.

Join Shaine Mata on The Morning Show. It can be brilliant, it can be lame. What do you expect from a show in the morning? Talk about politics, life, news, or whatever.

Upping the Ante

I have decided to raise my commitment to my virtual assistant from 10 hours per month to 20 hours per month. Through GetFriday.com, that means $200 out of pocket each month. I believe that I may be able to drive up enough business to cover the added cost. My original purpose for hiring a VA has changed.

In a flash of inspiration, it occurred to me what the best use of my VA’s time would be. Originally, my intent was to have her remind me of birthdays and help me keep track of business transactions. After interviewing her, I learned that she is very skilled with computers, including programming in C++, which I can’t do. On the downside, accounting is a whole other discipline from programming. I guess having her make double entries and print monthly and quarterly reports is a bit much to ask for a non-accounting major. On the upside, she is PERFECT for helping me post content on my websites. Aside from accounting chores, one major time sink for me is posting content. If I can create or find content for her to post, I can save myself hours per week. One example of this is finding local video on YouTube and posting it on RGV-Life.com. I can find the videos and send links for her to post.

You’re probably thinking, “How lazy can you get?” It’s not laziness. I can only post so many videos and press releases sent to me because I have limited time. This way I can maintain a good level of content creation without spending time posting it. Unlike this blog, other sites don’t lend themselves to mobile posting. I can blog anywhere on Earth with GSM coverage. However, I can’t find video, do embeds, upload pics, copy and paste press releases, or other tasks that require me to be sitting in front of a computer. Unfortunately, Ning is not mobile-friendly. The more time I spend waiting for pages to load, copying and pasting, and tagging, the less time there is for creating. In a world where content is king, I should be out creating, not waiting. For accounting, maybe a local bookkeeper can do the trick.

You Should Get to Know Your Virtual Assistant

You can miss out on making the best use of your virtual assistant if you don’t take the time to get to know him or her. Just like in college, it is probably best to ask your VA what their major was in college. This gives you an idea of their mindset and where they would be more effective. I recently did the same with my own Va. It turns out that she is a graduate of a computer major. She can program and is knowledgeable in software. This changes my approach a little. Obviously, I won’t be assigning difficult Accounting tasks. However, she will probably be very useful in technology-related tasks. Arbitrage?

Of course, over time, it would be best to learn as much about your VA, especially if he or she is your only “employee”. In my experience, there is nothing more demotivating than working for somebody who doesn’t truly know you or care to know you. A friend once told me that it doesn’t matter how nice you are to your employees. The fact that you are the boss automatically make you an asshole. I tend to agree. All I propose is that you be mindful of what degree of an asshole you are. So, get to know your VA so that you are a better judge of what and how you should assign things. I don’t expect knowledge of debits, credits, general ledgers, and accounts from a computer major. Similarly, I don’t expect knowledge of loops, conditionals, switches, modules, or local and global variables from an Accounting major. As they say, a poor carpenter blames his tools.

Some Feedback About Virtual Assistants

A while back, I wrote about my decision to take on a Virtual Assistant for a fixed monthly fee. Previously, I was paying a $10 retainer fee to GetFriday.com to have a VA available for the occasional odd job. Now, I’ve raised my subscription to $120/month for 10 hours of service. I’ll have to figure out how to best use those hours through the month.

When I wrote this, I was not expecting the responses I received on the topic. I’ve had comments from several companies that offer VA services. Some of them seem intriguing. Here is a list of those who have commented thus far:

I’ve also had visits from people who are making it work in the U.S. as VAs.

One thing that has caught my attention regarding VAs in the U.S. vs VAs in foreign countries is the idea that domestic VAs cost more on an hourly basis, but generally charge less per task because it takes them less time to perform it. World Office Support writes that foreign VAs generally take longer to perform a task than their American counterparts. It’s a penny wise, pound foolish argument. They may well have a point; but it is difficult for me to test given that American VAs earn more than I do on an hourly basis. I think we are probably talking about different markets. American VAs are targeting people with more money than time. Foreign VAs seem to be targeting those of us with little of both. I’ve got the pennies, not the pounds.

A good example of the situation has to do with shampoo. Unilever tried selling shampoo in India just like they do in other countries. For some reason, their product was not moving. However, they did notice that travel-size shampoo was selling much better. Why? Well, you do get a better deal by buying shampoo in larger quantities, but often you only have enough money for small quantities, even with the added cost. So, the market could afford shampoo in travel-size containers much better than the standard size containers.

In the end, what you should get out of this is that comes down to arbitrage. One has to be able to buy and sell the same product at a difference in price in order to make a profit. The product in my case is time. At my current rate, there is parity between what I earn at my day job and what GetFriday earns. However, there is a price differential between what I earn in my computer business and what GetFriday earns. It is better for me to use the VA for business-related tasks than personal tasks. It pays for itself, in a way. If I were to move up one tier of monthly service, then it would actually be feasible to give my VA personal assignments as well. I could not do the same with an American VA. I’d operate at a loss whether it’s 1 minute or 60. At this point, I am short on time and money. I need to leverage both. I know I won’t be successful if I am paying my VA more than I earn on an hourly basis. Doing business at a loss is both penny and pound foolish. Maybe once I’m rich I’ll be able to hire an American VA; but not now.

Setting Up the System for my Virtual Assistant

When you hire somebody, they don’t know everything about your business. I’ve had to train new employees in the past. I’ve shown them almost every aspect of the business that they will deal with from day to day. Heck, I even showed them how to do their own payroll. So, whenever you hire somebody, you accept that there will be a certain amount of training and ground rules to establish. The same holds for hiring a virtual assistant. Some groundwork is needed.

Thus far, I have sent my VA my client information. I have sent her jobs I’ve done and how much I got paid. I’ve sent her information about new leads. Just today, I finished creating my price list of services. Theoretically, all I have to do now is submit the number of hours worked and job descriptions for each client so that she can create invoices. I don’t expect things to work “according to plan” on the first try. There will be a few trial and error attempts, just like with an on-site employee. For now, we are setting up a system that she will use to do what I need done. We will refine the system as we go along.

In time, I expect that we will both work efficiently together. We are still getting to know each other, as much as it is possible to do so long-distance. Once we have a system established, I think Sahnaz will be a powerhouse for me. What is even better is that I will figure out what works and what doesn’t so that I can use that knowledge to train the next VA should Sahnaz decide to move on in her career. This is as much training for me as it is for her.

If you think you need a virtual assistant, you should consider GetFriday.com as well. I’ll keep you posted on how this business experiment works for me.

First Virtual Assistant Assignment

Yesterday, I contacted my Virtual Assistant, Sahnaz, with a list of important dates. These are birthdays of various people in my family. She is to call me a week in advance to remind me of the upcoming birthday and suggest a gift. Upon my approval, she will then proceed to shop for each member within a given price range.

I kept the first assignment simple and long-term as India recently lost Internet service due to a cable break somewhere in Egypt. I got an email from GetFriday.com, where Sahnaz works, informing me of the Internet interruption. I still have more hours to go for assignments this month. I’ll be assigninig business-related tasks mostly.

I Hired a Virtual Assistant

If you have read The Four Hour Work Week, you know that the author, Timothy Ferriss, writes about hiring a virtual assistant to outsource your life. One of the companies he suggests is named Your Man in India, which is not the right company. YMII is for Indian expats who need stuff done back home. There is another company called GetFriday.com which is the right one. They have virtual assistants on a variety of plans you can hire. SmartMoney’s A. J. Jacobs has the most well-known article on the topic of hiring virtual assistants. Other companies include Brickwork and Task Everyday. I have more modest needs.

Get Friday is a service that I have used before, and now am ramping up a bit. I had Get Friday on a retainer of $10/month. At this rate, tasks are billed in 15 minute increments at $15/hour. I’ve used them here and there for odd jobs. I’ve gone months without using their service just paying the $10 retainer. I figured that I had little to lose by keeping them on my payroll and on standby. I’ve used the service sparingly because, at $15/hr it’s more than I earn. I have to really, really not want to do something in order to outsource it.

Making assignments is simple enough. I send out an email to my assistant, Sahnaz, with the details of the assignment. She lets me know when it is done. I have not used my virtual assistant to do any shopping for me. Perhaps that will change in the future. In any event, my interaction with my virtual assistant has been very easy. What’s even cooler is that I received a Christmas card from Sahnaz today. I thought that was very thoughtful. It’s also my first piece of mail from India.

I have a feeling that things are about to get busy for me. I have demands from all different directions by people who want me on their team. For this reason, I have increased my monthly subscription to the next level. For $120/month Get Friday will give me 10 hours of service. The billing is in 10 minute increments. If I go over, then I am billed at $14/hr. They have other monthly plans at 20, 40, 80, and 160 hours per month ranging from $200 to $1120 per month. The more hours you contract them per month, the lower your hourly rate. Of course, it all depends on your needs.

I don’t know what task I’ll be sending Sahnaz for February to fill those 10 hours. I decided to buy the block of time rather than work up to 10 hours so that it forces me to delegate. Being a “boss” is a learned skill. You have to learn to let go of certain things and trust somebody else to get them done. I hope that she will be useful in earning more money so that I can upgrade my plan.

I have some ideas as to how Sahnaz will help me. One way in which she could help me out is to help me stay on top of important dates. Another possibility is to keep track of my business transactions. I enjoy fixing computers and helping people. I can’t say that I enjoy the accounting part. In fact, it makes sense to make Sahnaz a part of my business. My computer services business pays me more on an hourly rate than my day job. Using Sahnaz to help me with my salaried day job is all cost. Using her to help me make money is a cost of doing business. I only pay more when I make more money.

For now, this is experimental for me. I don’t know how hiring a virtual assistant for a fixed number of hours per month will help me. More than anything, I hope that I make smart decisions as to what I should outsource and what I should do myself. I’ll keep you posted at the end of February how things go.