It was a beautiful sunny day, and I closed my laptop with a smile. For an all-you-can-eat buffet breakfast with coffee and orange juice, I paid $4 U.S. The Indian outsourcers cost between $4–10 U.S. per hour. My domestic outsourcers are paid on performance or when product ships. This creates a curious business phenomenon: Negative cash flow is impossible.
Fun things happen when you earn dollars, live on pesos, and compensate in rupees, but that’s just the beginning.
But I’m an Employee! How Does This Help Me?
Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it.
—MALCOLM X, Malcolm X Speaks
Getting a remote personal assistant is a huge departure point and marks the moment that you learn how to give orders and be commander instead of the commanded. It is small-scale training wheels for the most critical of NR skills: remote management and communication.
It is time to learn how to be the boss. It isn’t time-consuming. It’s low-cost and it’s low-risk. Whether or not you “need” someone at this point is immaterial. It is an exercise.
It is also a litmus test for entrepreneurship: Can you manage (direct and chastise) other people? Given the proper instruction and practice, I believe so. Most entrepreneurs fail because they jump into the deep end of the pool without learning to swim first. Using a virtual assistant (VA) as a simple exercise with no downside, the basics of management are covered in a 2–4-week test costing between $100–400. This is an investment, not an expense, and the ROI is astounding. It will be repaid in a maximum of 10–14 days, after which it is pure timesaving profit.
Becoming a member of the NR is not just about working smarter. It’s about building a system to replace yourself.
This is the first exercise.
Even if you have no intention of becoming an entrepreneur, this is the ultimate continuation of our 80/20 and elimination process: Preparing someone to replace you (even if it never happens) will produce an ultrarefined set of rules that will cut remaining fat and redundancy from your schedule. Lingering unimportant tasks will disappear as soon as someone else is being paid to do them.
But what about the cost?
This is a hurdle that is hard for most. If I can do it better than an assistant, why should I pay them at all? Because the goal is to free your time to focus on bigger and better things.
This chapter is a low-cost exercise to get you past this lifestyle limiter. It is absolutely necessary that you realize that you can always do something more cheaply yourself. This doesn’t mean you want to spend your time doing it. If you spend your time, worth $20–25 per hour, doing something that someone else will do for $10 per hour, it’s simply a poor use of resources. It is important to take baby steps toward paying others to do work for you. Few do it, which is another reason so few people have their ideal lifestyles.
Even if the cost is occasionally more per hour than you currently earn, the trade is often worth it. Let’s assume you make $50,000 and thus $25 per hour (working from 9–5, Monday through Friday, for 50 weeks per year). If you pay a top-notch assistant $30 per hour and he or she saves you one full 8-hour shift per week, your cost (subtracting what you’re being paid) is $40 to free an extra day. Would you pay $40 per week to work Monday to Thursday? I would, and I do. Keep in mind that this is a worst-case cost scenario.
But what if your boss freaks out?
It’s largely a non-issue, and prevention is better than cure. There is no ethical or legal reason for the boss to know if you choose non-sensitive tasks. The first option is to assign personal items. Time is time, and if you’re spending time on chores and errands that could be spent better elsewhere, a VA will improve life and the management learning curve is similar. Second, you can delegate business tasks that don’t include financial information or identify your company.
Ready to build an army of assistants? Let’s first look at the dark side of delegation. A review is in order to prevent abuses of power and wasteful behavior.
Delegation Dangers: Before Getting Started
The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
—BILL GATES
Have you ever been given illogical assignments, handed unimportant work, or commanded to do something in the most inefficient fashion possible? Not fun and not productive.
Now it’s your turn to show that you know better. Delegation is to be used as a further step in reduction, not as an excuse to create more movement and add the unimportant. Remember—unless something is well-defined and important, no one should do it.
Eliminate before you delegate.
Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined. Otherwise, you waste someone else’s time instead of your own, which now wastes your hard-earned cash. How’s that for incentive to be effective and efficient? Now you’re playing with your own dough. It’s something I want you to get comfortable with, and this baby step is small stakes.
Did I mention to eliminate before you delegate?
For example, it is popular among executives to have assistants read e-mail. In some cases this is valuable. In my case, I use spam filters, autoresponders with FAQs, and automatic forwarding to outsourcers to limit my e-mail obligation to 10–20 e-mail responses per week. It takes me 30 minutes per week because I used systems—elimination and automation—to make it so.
Nor do I use an assistant to set meetings and conference calls because I have eliminated meetings. If I need to set the odd 20-minute call for a given month, I’ll send one two-sentence e-mail and be done with it.
Principle number one is to refine rules and processes before adding people. Using people to leverage a refined process multiplies production; using people as a solution to a poor process multiplies problems.
The Menu: A World of Possibilities
I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.
—BISHOP DESMOND TUTU, South African cleric and activist
The next question then becomes, “What should you delegate?” It’s a good question, but I don’t want to answer it. I want to watch Family Guy.
The truth be told, it is a hell of a lot of work writing about not working. Ritika of Brickwork and Venky of YMII are more than capable of writing this section, so I’ll just mention two guidelines and leave the mental hernia of detail work to them.
Golden Rule #1: Each delegated task must be both time-consuming and well-defined. If you’re running around like a chicken with its head cut off and assign your VA to do that for you, it doesn’t improve the order of the universe.
Golden Rule #2: On a lighter note, have some fun with it. Have someone in Bangalore or Shanghai send e-mails to friends as your personal concierge to set lunch dates or similar basics. Harass your boss with odd phone calls in strong accents from unknown numbers. Being effective doesn’t mean being serious all the time. It’s fun being in control for a change. Get a bit of repression off your chest so it doesn’t turn into a complex later.
Getting Personal and Going Howard Hughes
Howard Hughes, the ultrarich filmmaker and eccentric from The Aviator, was notorious for assigning odd tasks to his assistants. Here are a few from Donald Bartlett’s Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness you might want to consider.
1. After his first plane crash, Hughes confided in a friend that he believed his recovery was due to his consumption of orange juice and its healing properties. He believed that exposure to the air diluted the juice’s potency, so he demanded that fresh oranges be sliced and juiced in front of him.
2. When Hughes was partaking of the nightlife in Las Vegas, his aides were charged with approaching any girls he took a liking to. If a girl was invited to join the Hughes table and agreed, an aide would pull out a waiver and agreement for her to sign.
3. Hughes had a barber on call 24/7 but had his hair and nails trimmed about once a year.
4. In his hotel-bound years, Hughes was rumored to have instructed assistants to place a single cheeseburger in a specific tree outside his penthouse room at a 4:00 P.M. each day, whether he was there or not.
Such a world of possibilities! Just as the Model-T brought transportation to the masses, virtual assistants bring eccentric billionaire behavior within reach of each man, woman, and child. Now, that’s progress.
Without further ado, let me pass the mic. Note that YMII performs both personal and business tasks, whereas Brickwork focuses solely on business projects. Let’s start with the important but dull stuff and move quickly from the sublime to the ridiculous. To give a true taste of what to expect, I have not corrected non-native-sounding English.
Venky: Don’t limit yourself. Just ask us if something is possible. We’ve arranged parties, organized caterers, researched summer courses, cleaned up accounting books, created 3D drafts based on blueprints. Just ask us. We could find the closest kid-friendly restaurant to your house for your son’s birthday, finding out costs and organizing the birthday party. This frees up your time to work or hang out with your son.
What can we not do? We can’t do anything that would require our physical presence. But you would be surprised as to how small a set of tasks that is in this day and age.
Here are the most common tasks we handle:
scheduling interviews and meetings web-research following up on appointments, errands, and tasks online purchases creation of legal documents website maintenance (web design, publishing, uploading files) that doesn’t require a professional designer monitoring, editing, and publishing comments for online discussions posting job vacancies on the web document creation proofreading and editing documents for spelling and formatting online research for updating blogs updating the database for Customer Relationship Management Software managing recruitment processes updating invoices and receiving payments voicemail transcription
Ritika at Brickwork added the following:
market research financial research business plans industry analysis market assessment reports preparing presentations reports and newsletters legal research analytics website development search engine optimization maintaining and updating databases credit scoring managing procurement processes
Venky: We have a forgetful client who has us call him all the time with various reminders. One of our clients on a custom plan has us wake him up every morning. We’ve done the legwork and found people who fell out of contact after Katrina. Found jobs for clients! My favorite so far: One of our clients has a pair of trousers that he really likes that aren’t in production anymore. He’s sending them to Bangalore (from London) to have created exact replicas at a tiny fraction of the price.
Here are a few other YMII custom requests:
Reminding an overzealous client to pay his current parking fines, as well as not speed and collect parking fines.
Apologizing and sending flowers and cards to spouses of clients.
Charting a diet plan, reminding client on it regularly, ordering groceries based on the specific diet plan.
Getting a job for a person who lost his job due to outsourcing a year back. We did the job search, did the cover letters, did the resume tuning, and got the client a job in 30 days.
Fixing a broken windowpane of a house in Geneva, Switzerland.
Collecting homework information from teacher’s voicemail and e-mailing it to the client (parents of the kid).
Research on how to tie a shoelace meant for a kid (client’s son).
Find a parking slot for your car in some other city even before you make the trip.
Ordered garbage bins for home.
Get an authenticated weather forecast and weather report for a particular time in a particular place on a particular day, five years ago. This was to be used as supportive evidence for a lawsuit.
Talking to parents in our client’s stead.
Here’s another real example of personal outsourcing from reader David Cross, who got a personal chef at home for less than $5 per meal. Just thinking of the possibilities is enough to make you start drooling. He explains:
I wanted to find someone to prepare food I love. I trained as a chef but I am often so busy and as I am the only one in the house who really cooks, I often don’t have time to prepare the food that makes me feel the healthiest so I wrote the attached ad and dropped it on Craigslist.
This was a very tight focus—ultraspecific—I had just two applicants in two months—one who was a 2/10 match but the guy we just OK’d was a Hare Krishna follower for many years, lived in India, and his sample menu proved he knew what he’s doing so we just started him.
The food is absolutely awesome. The hourly rate is *extremely reasonable,* he’s a five-minute detour when either of us are in town to collect food and I now have delicious Indian food for less than $5 a meal and it’s as good as anything I’ve ever eaten anywhere.
I’m going to progress to other cuisines now… Thai, Italian, Chinese, etc., and it means when I do have time to cook I’ll enjoy doing it that much more as I am not the only one cooking!
Indian/Asian Vegetarian Cook Needed
Date: 2007–06–07, 12:25PM PDT
Hello.
We are a local, international family who love Indian and Asian vegetarian food. We are looking for a cook experienced in this wonderful cuisine to prepare delicious, fresh, healthy, authentic Indian/Asian vegetarian meals for us.
If you’ve cooked a curry once or twice or need to follow recipes, this position is probably not for you, but if you know Indian vegetarian cooking in depth and can prepare delicious, healthy, fresh, authentic Indian vegetarian food then we’d like to hear from you. This could be an ideal opportunity if you are Indian, Pakistani, Punjabi, etc., and are looking for a great way to apply your experience and love of Indian vegetarian food, cooking and culture. Knowledge of Ayurved and how this relates to food and diet is a plus though not essential.