Please reply with details of your experience and some dishes you could prepare. If we like what you have to offer, we’ll arrange for you to cook a sample meal or two which we will pay you for and then we’ll see what works out for us all.
This is a part-time position. You will be self-employed and responsible for your own taxes, etc. We’ll pay you an hourly rate we will agree with you plus grocery bills for the food you prepare. You can prepare food in your own place and we can arrange to collect it from you, possibly for us to freeze for later eating. We will work with you to come up with menus and schedules that work out for you and us.
Thank you for your interest.
Basic Choices: New Delhi or New York?
There are tens of thousands of VAs—how on earth do you find the right one? The resources at the end of this chapter will show you where to look, but it is overwhelming and confusing unless you have a few criteria determined in advance.
It often helps to begin with the question “Where on Earth?”
Remote or Local?
“Made in the USA” doesn’t have the ring it used to. The pros of jumping time zones and visiting third-world currency are twofold: People work while you sleep, and the per-hour expense is less. Time savings and cost savings. Ritika explains the former with an example.
One can give the remote personal assistant in India their assignment when they are leaving work at the end of the day in New York City, and they will have the presentation ready the next morning. Because of the time difference with India, assistants can work on it while they are asleep and have it back in their morning. When they wake up, they will find the completed summary in their inbox. These assistants can also help them keep pace with what they want to read, for example.
Indian and Chinese VAs, as well as most from other developing countries, will run $4–15 per hour, the lower end being limited to simple tasks and the higher end including the equivalent of Harvard or Stanford M.B.A.s and Ph.D.s. Need a business plan to raise funding? Brickwork can provide it for between $2,500–5,000 instead of $15,000–20,000. Foreign assistance isn’t just for the small time. I know from firsthand discussions that executives from big five accounting and management consulting firms routinely charge clients six figures for research reports that are then farmed to India for low four figures.
In the U.S. or Canada, the per-hour range is often $25–100. Seems like an obvious choice, right? Bangalore 100%? It’s not. The important metric is cost per completed task, not cost per hour.
The biggest challenge with overseas help will be the language barrier, which often quadruples back-and-forth discussion and the ultimate cost. The first time I hired an Indian VA, I made the fundamental mistake of not setting an hour cap for three simple tasks. I checked in later that week and found he had spent 23 hours chasing his tail. He had scheduled one tentative interview for the following week, set at the wrong time! Mind boggling. 23 hours? It ended up costing me, at $10 per hour, $230. The same tasks, assigned later that week to a native English speaker in Canada, were completed in two hours at $25 per hour. $50 for more than four times the results. That said, I later requested another Indian VA from the same firm who was able to duplicate the native speaker results.
How do you know which to choose? That’s the beautiful part: You don’t. It’s a matter of testing a few assistants to both sharpen your communication skills and determine who is worth hiring and who is worth firing. Being a results-based boss isn’t as simple as it looks.
There are a number of lessons to be learned here.
First, per-hour cost is not the ultimate determinant of cost. Look at per-task cost. If you need to spend time restating the task and otherwise managing the VA, determine the time required of you and add this (using your per-hour rate from earlier chapters) to the end sticker price of the task. It can be surprising. As cool as it is to say that you have people working for you in three countries, it’s uncool to spend time babysitting people who are supposed to make your life easier.
Second, the proof is in the pudding. It is impossible to predict how well you will work with a given VA without a trial. Luckily, there are things you can do to improve your odds, and one of them is using a VA firm instead of a solo operator.
Solo vs. Support Team
Let’s suppose you find the perfect VA. He or she is performing all of your noncritical tasks and you’ve decided to take a much-deserved vacation to Thailand. It’s nice to know someone besides you will be manning the wheel and putting out fires for a change. Finally, some relief! Two hours before your flight from Bangkok to Phuket, you receive an e-mail: Your VA is out of commission and will be in the hospital for the next week. Not good. Vacation FUBAR.
I don’t like being dependent on one person, and I don’t recommend it in the least. In the world of high technology, this type of dependency would be referred to as a “single point of failure”—one fragile item upon which all else depends. In the world of IT,15 the term “redundancy” is used as a selling point for systems that continue to function if there is a malfunction or mechanical failure in any given part. In the context of VAs, redundancy entails having fallback support.
I recommend that you hire a VA firm or VAs with backup teams instead of sole operators. Examples abound, of course, of people who have had a single assistant for decades without incident, but I suggest that this is the exception rather than the rule. Better safe than sorry. Besides simple disaster avoidance, a group structure provides a pool of talent that allows you to assign multiple tasks without bothering to find a new person with the qualifications. Brickwork and YMII both exemplify this type of structure and provide a single point of contact, a personal account manager, who then farms out your tasks to the most-capable people in the group and across different shifts. Need graphic design? Covered. Need database management? Covered. I don’t like calling and coordinating multiple people. I want one-stop shopping and am willing to pay 10% more to have it. I encourage you to be similarly pound-wise and penny-foolish.
Team preference doesn’t mean that bigger is better, just that multiple people are better than one person. The best VA I have used to date is an Indian with five backup assistants under him. Three can be more than sufficient, but two is toeing the line.
The #1 Fear: “Sweetheart, Did You Buy a Porsche in China?”
I’m sure you might have your fears. AJ certainly did:
My outsourcers now know an alarming amount about me—not just my schedule but my cholesterol, my infertility problems, my Social Security number, my passwords (including the one that is a particularly adolescent curse word). Sometimes I worry that I can’t piss off my outsourcers or I’ll end up with a $12,000 charge on my MasterCard bill from the Louis Vuitton in Anantapur.
The good news is that misuse of financial and confidential information is rare. In all of the interviews I conducted for this section, I could find only one case of information abuse, and I had to search long and hard. It involved an overworked U.S.-based VA who hired freelance help at the last moment.
Commit to memory the following—never use the new hire. Prohibit small-operation VAs from subcontracting work to untested freelancers without your written permission. The more established and higher-end firms, Brickwork in the below example, have security measures that border on excessive and make it simple to pinpoint abusers in the case of a breach:
Employees undergo background checks and sign NDAs (nondisclosure agreements) in accordance with the company policy of maintaining confidentiality of client information
Electronic access card for entry and exit
Credit card information keyed only by select supervisors
Removal of paper from the offices is prohibited
VLAN-based access restrictions between different teams; this ensures that there is no unauthorized access of information between people of different teams in the organization
Regular reporting on printer logs
Floppy drives and USB ports disabled
BS779 certification for accomplished international security standards
128-bit encryption technology for all data exchange
Secure VPN connection
I bet there is a fair chance that sensitive data is 100 times safer with Brickwork than on your own computer.
Still, information theft is best thought of as inevitable in a digital world, and precautions should be taken with damage control in mind. There are two rules that I use to minimize damage and allow for fast repair.
1. Never use debit cards for online transactions or with remote assistants. Reversing unauthorized credit card charges, particularly with American Express, is painless and near instantaneous. Recovering funds withdrawn from your checking account via unauthorized debit card use takes dozens of hours in paperwork alone and can take months to receive, if approved at all.
2. If your VA will be accessing websites on your behalf, create a new unique login and password to be used on those sites. Most of us reuse both logins and passwords on multiple sites, and taking this precaution limits possible damage. Instruct them to use these unique logins to create accounts on new sites if needed. Note that this is particularly important when using assistants who have access to live commercial websites (developers, programmers, etc.).
If information or identity theft hasn’t hit you, it will. Use these guidelines and you’ll realize when it happens that, just like most nightmares, it’s not that big a deal and is reversible.
The Complicated Art of Simplicity:
Common Complaints
My assistant is an idiot! It took him 23 hours to book an interview! This was the first complaint I had, for sure. 23 hours! I was heated up for a shouting match. My original e-mail to this first assistant seemed clear enough.
Dear Abdul,
Here are the first tasks, due at the end of next Tuesday. Please call or e-mail with any questions:
1. Go to this article http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12666060/site/newsweek/, get the phone/e-mail/website contacts for Carol Milligan and Marc and Julie Szekely. Also find the same info for Rob Long here http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12652789/site/newsweek/.
2. Schedule 30-minute interviews for Carol, Marc/Julie, and Rob. Use www.myevents.com (username: notreal, password: donttryit) to book them in my calendar for next week any time between 9–9 ET.
3. Find the name, e-mail, and phone (phone is least important) of workers in the U.S. who have negotiated remote work agreements (telecommuting) despite resistant bosses. Those who have traveled outside the U.S. are ideal. Other keywords could include “teleworking” and “telecommuting.” The important factor is that they negotiated with difficult bosses. Please send me links to their profiles or write a paragraph describing why they fit the profile above.
Look forward to seeing what you can do. Please e-mail if you don’t understand or have questions.
Best,
Tim
The truth is—I was at fault. This is not a good debut demand, and I made fatal mistakes even before composing it. If you are an effective person but unaccustomed to issuing commands, assume that most problems at the outset are your fault. It is tempting to immediately point the finger at someone else and huff and puff, but most beginner bosses repeat the same mistakes I made.
1. I accepted the first person the firm provided and made no special requests at the outset.
Request someone who has “excellent” English and indicate that phone calls will be required (even if not). Be fast to request a replacement if there are repeated communication issues.
2. I gave imprecise directions.
I asked him to schedule interviews but didn’t indicate that it was for an article. He assumed, based on work with previous clients, that I wanted to hire someone and he misspent time compiling spreadsheets and combing online job sites for additional information I didn’t need.
Sentences should have one possible interpretation and be suitable for a 2nd-grade reading level. This goes for native speakers as well and will make requests clearer. Ten-dollar words disguise imprecision.
Note that I asked him to respond if he didn’t understand or had questions. This is the wrong approach. Ask foreign VAs to rephrase tasks to confirm understanding before getting started.
3. I gave him a license to waste time.
This brings us again to damage control. Request a status update after a few hours of work on a task to ensure that the task is both understood and achievable. Some tasks are, after initial attempts, impossible.
4. I set the deadline a week in advance.
Use Parkinson’s Law and assign tasks that are to be completed within no more than 72 hours. I have had the best luck with 48 and 24 hours. This is another compelling reason to use a small group (three or more) rather than a single individual who can become overtaxed with last-minute requests from multiple clients. Using short deadlines does not mean avoiding larger tasks (e.g., business plan), but rather breaking them into smaller milestones that can be completed in shorter time frames (outline, competitive research summaries, chapters, etc.).
5. I gave him too many tasks and didn’t set an order of importance.
I advise sending one task at a time whenever possible and no more than two. If you want to cause your computer to hang or crash, open 20 windows and applications at the same time. If you want to do the same to your assistant, assign him or her a dozen tasks without prioritizing them. Recall our mantra: Eliminate before you delegate.
WHAT DOES A good VA task e-mail look like? The following example was recently sent to an Indian VA whose results have been nothing short of spectacular:
Dear Sowmya,
Thank you. I would like to start with the following task.
TASK: I need to find the names and e-mails of editors of men’s magazines in the US (for example: maxim, stuff, GQ, esquire, blender, etc.) who also have written books. An example of such a person would be AJ Jacobs who is Editor-at-Large of Esquire (www.ajjacobs.com). I already have his information and need more like him.