My 4-Hour Work Week Experiment

Posted by: admin | Posted at: September 18th, 2009 | Posted in Virtual Assistant Services

My 4-Hour Work Week Experiment
By: Andrew Brown

In a recent article, I touched on Timothy Ferriss’ book The 4 Hour Work Week. While I can’t say I agreed with the practicality of all of his suggestions, I did find some of his ideas very interesting and figured I’d try some on for size. Namely, I wanted to find my very own Virtual Assistant.

Just what is a Virtual Assistant? Well, in simplest terms, they’re like a secretary – providing administrative / clerical support to a busy executive. They can do whatever any assistant can do as long as they don’t have to be physically present. So while you couldn’t have them pick up your dry cleaning, they’d be more than happy to research an upcoming presentation for you.

The Search Begins
Ferriss’ book mentions a couple resources – Brickwork, Your Man In India (YIIM), & Elance to name a few. I chose a shot gun approach and made inquiries with all three. Evidently, I was not the first person follow in Mr. Ferriss’ footsteps. My initial requests for information from both Brickwork and YMII were met with requests for me to ‘please be patient due to a recent upsurge of customer inquiries.’

Elance was a different story altogether. I posted a job request and within a few hours started receiving bids on my project request.

I have to admit that I initially was biased towards Brickwork and YMII because both promised highly educated professionals in myriad areas of expertise. They also offered 800#s, 24 x 7 service, and skilled project management capabilities to source my tasks to a resource best suited for my needs.

I was drooling at the thought of being able to jot an email request at 9pm at night and then having a full report waiting for me in my inbox the next morning.

My expectation was that anyone I found on Elance would be hard pressed to match the infrastructure of one of the more established services.

But would that be the reality of the situation? Would the experiment be a success?

First Contact
After about a week, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Satwik Joglekar of Brickwork. We had a 20 minute interview where he assessed my needs to ensure we had a good fit. I really liked Dr. Joglekar but my only concern was the difficulty we had communicating with each other. His accent was very thick and I had to keep asking him to repeat himself. This made me feel horrible.

Here’s this guy. He’s extremely well educated. He speaks multiple languages. I’m confident his IQ was 10X that of mine — I know, I know that’s probably not saying a lot. But the whole time I’m having to ask him to repeat himself because I just couldn’t make out what he was trying to say. Yeah, I guess that makes me the Ugly American expecting the world to meet my needs and communicate with me on my terms — but it is what it is and IT was painful.

That same week I was sent a description of services & contract agreement from YMII. My initial contact, Pushpa, said if I was agreeable to the terms I could sign document and I’d be assigned a VA (Virtual Assistant) within 3 weeks. That’s right — 3 weeks. I read the agreement and it was fairly benign and offered a trial period which would easily let me out of my commitment if I wasn’t happy. The documentation they provided was well thought out and I was anxious to get started, so I signed.

Elance. As I mentioned I received multiple bids within hours of me putting up my original post. Many, many were boiler plate responses but a number of them responded with intelligent & well thought out proposals. All in all, there were 14 bids which I was able to narrow down to 4-5.

So ummm what’s this going to cost?
Brickwork – assuming most of our communications would be written, I was very impressed with Brickwork. I really felt they could handle anything I could throw at them. They too had a bit of a lead time before they could assign someone to me. But I got the sense whoever it was would know their stuff. But it was going to cost me. Minimum to get started I had to be willing to pay $600 a month for 30 hours of work. Yikes. That was not the $4/hr. mentioned in Mr. Ferriss’ book.

YMII had a more reasonable entry fee. Prices started at $15 per hour but went down to $7 if I were willing to commit to 160 hours per month. I settled in on their $120 per month plan @ $12/hr.

Elance varied between $4 – $40 per hour. I had offers from US & Canadian firms which were on the high end but I did get the feeling communication skills would be worth it. In the end I settled on Kaya Systems @ $6.5/hr. I settled on them not because they were the lowest bidder, because they weren’t. I just felt they had put the most time & thought in responding to my request. They said what they were good at, what they weren’t suitable for, and they provided intelligent responses to any questions I asked.

My First Assignment
So after eliminating Brickwork just for budgetary concerns. I found myself with two VAs: Ashwin as assigned by YMII and Hassan of Kaya Systems.

I still had to wait a few weeks to get going with YMII so Hassan (Kaya Systems) & I got a head start on things.

Hassan Bokhari is actually based in Athens, Georgia. He founded the company with his brother Razi after getting his MBA in Finance & General Management at the University of Texas at Austin.

Kaya has a two step process. First, all tasks are managed by Hassan or Razi. They feel as Americans they’ll be able to quickly understand what the requirements are and set performance parameters for regular processes. The second step involves transferring the work to their colleagues in South Asia. This approach makes sense as they’re essentially acting as the communications bridge between their clients and their team.

Hassan & I were both on the same page. Delegation of tasks to a VA is an iterative process. My first goal was to get regular maintenance of the Small Business Guru Web site and email newsletter into someone else’s hands. This was a series of repeatable steps that if offloaded, would free up my time to focus more on what I do best — which is NOT managing a Web site.

We started off slow. The weekly management of the Web site and newsletter generally took me about 5-6 hours per week. I was able to divide the project into chunks of work that I could transfer to Hassan. I knew I wouldn’t be able to teach the whole process to him in one week and still get the newsletter out in time. So we broke it up in chunks and over a 3 week period we eventually got it to the point where Hassan was handling the whole thing from start to finish.

At first, the back and forth of this process doubled the lead times for stuff that I’d normally just pound out myself. But once Kaya ‘got it’ — it was AWESOME. Not only did I gain the 5-6 hours a week, I just don’t have to do something that I hated doing. I can relax and know they have it covered.

YMII’s Turn
By the time YMII was ready to take me on as a client, I was already sold on this whole Virtual Assistant idea. I was excited to try YMII because I figured with their infrastructure they’d be able to really take me to the next level. Unfortunately, that changed within the first week’s worth of assignments.

Based on what I read in their literature, I was expecting YMII to bring some bench depth with respect to research and analysis. The idea was forming in my mind that I could use Kaya for data entry type tasks and YMII for research and analysis.

I started by assigning a research project. I tried to set expectations for questions I wanted answered, how long the project should take, and what resources they might want to check out. Two days later I received a very thin report that apparently took 3 hours to put together. It failed to answer my questions and was little more than a one page document with a couple links to some Web sites.

By contrast, I tried assigning the same exact project to Kaya. What a difference.

Hassan first sent me an email with some questions he had on the task. He wanted to make very sure he understood my objectives before just jumping right in and eating up a bunch of hours. Then when he did deliver the report, it was a thing of beauty. It was packed with RELEVANT information. It answered all my questions. It had summaries of the pros & cons of each option presented. It was more than I hoped for and it only cost me $18.

Conclusion
For me, Kaya Systems ended up being the clear winner.

Perhaps if I had invested more time in coaching YMII, we could have eventually established a good working relationship. I still think YMII is probably an excellent company. If anything, I’m guessing they’re probably just a victim of their own success. I just got the impression they were struggling to keep up with an onslaught of new clients and thus were not able to provide the level of service they would have liked to.

Long & short, I’d say Kaya’s success stems from the high level of involvement by their principals. They offer a great service at a great price. They take the time to understand the expectations for each task before assigning them to some random associate.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kelly Andrew Brown of Small Business Guru provides Coaching, Inspiration and Practical Advice for Small Business Owners and Entrepreneurs. Subscribe to the free, weekly newsletter at www.small-business-guru.com

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Virtual Assistance in Real Estate Business

Posted by: admin | Posted at: September 11th, 2009 | Tags: Real Estate Virtual Assistance
Posted in Virtual Assistant Services

According to the National Association of Realtors [(NAR), www.realtor.org], “the housing sector contributed $2.1 trillion to the national economy in 2007, accounting for 15 percent of overall economic activity”. The association further states that 81% of agents/brokers buy or sell homes by using the internet; furthermore, 73% of buyers drive by/view a home they came across on the internet. It can safely be concluded that real estate business is information driven and one’s ability to find the right information at the right time and matching it up with the right buyer can pay huge dividends.

In a large sector such as housing, extracting information from this dynamic data can be a daunting task, but those who are able to successfully process this information hold the competitive advantage. Services of a virtual assistant outsourcing firm can help you gain this competitive advantage. Some of these firms have developed competencies in supporting real estate related businesses. They can act as your one-stop-shop for developing and maintaining your web presence, managing your CRM, updating your MLS listing, contact management (GroupMail 5, www.topproduceronline.com etc..), running your ad and online marketing campaigns, and newsletter and flyer design. So how does the process works? When a property comes on the market the real estate firms gets to work by taking property snapshots and collecting information. That information is sent to the virtual assistant associate and s/he gets to work and performs the following tasks:

• Conduct further research to locate parks, churches, etc. creating the external virtual tour and developing detailed property promotional package
• Perform price comparison
• Post property ads on different free/paid advertisement sites
• Advertise via social media
• Blog maintenance
• Email marketing
• Flyer and banner design (primarily for investment and commercial properties)

The other critical element is contact management. All the inquiries that are generated via the website, phone calls, and emails are collected in different categories that can be used for future relationship marketing. Also, clients are updated on a regular basis by generating property ad traffic report for them so they know how many people visited their property online.

The industry is dynamic and new tools, channels, and ideas are a regular feature. Your associate can help you scan those and recommend the ones that need serious consideration. Whether you need help in researching the referral system, or a software, or simply need material for your monthly blog, your VA is there to assist. They not only help reduce your workload but also help you stay ahead of the curve by advising you on the latest tools and ideas. The potential for virtual assist support is only limited by the bounds of your imagination. The opportunities are significant and applications are numerous!

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Selecting a back office service provider – Things to consider

Posted by: admin | Posted at: May 28th, 2009 | Posted in Back Office Services (BO)

Over the last few years, outsourcing of products & services has gained traction with Small & Medium Size Enterprises. As connectivity improved and bandwidth costs came down, outsourcing to low cost regions fast became a norm as apposed to an exception. These days SMEs are using back-end support in wide range of services from simple tasks such as data entry to writing complex business development plans to designing and developing advanced software systems. SMEs are reaping benefits in productivity gains, shorter turnaround times, and lower cost structures and are able to focus more on core business issues. Nonetheless, the task of finding the right provider that understands your business, communicates well, and most importantly responds promptly when things go wrong, is still daunting. Here are a few steps that can help you find the right provider.

Right Size Provider
If you represent a Small-to-Medium Enterprise (SME) then subscribing to a large back office service provider many not be a wise choice. While size has its benefits, a large provider will be more focused on big clients and if you only require one full-time associate, you will not be on his A or even B list. Mid size service providers are able to provide better value, service & flexibility.

Background
Thoroughly checking a provider’s background, management profile, and customer testimonials are all part of due diligence process. Time spent doing research upfront is time well spent.

Start Small
Run a pilot program with your selected provider before any long-term commitment is made. And while different situations may demand different durations, we strongly recommend that the pilot should be at least two months in duration. The goal is to test the provider on:

1. Overall task(s) quality (consistency, timely delivery etc…)
2. Response time in case of emergency
3. Quality of communication especially under stress
4. How disagreements are handled
5. Documentation/data provided in support of completed work

“Remote Local Office”
Consider your service provider as an extension of your company. Consider them “Your Remote local Office”. Think of the whole process as training a new employee into a new job. Make sure that your remotely located employees have some understanding of the company’s culture and its expectations and know the right people to contact if there is a need. Be open to new ideas that they may bring. Most likely, they have done similar consulting work with other companies and thus can bring fresh ideas and perspectives. Successfully integrating these remotely located employees into your company will pay long term dividends and help you focus more on growing your business.

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How VA Providers can help SMEs in Speeding up Technology Adoption

Posted by: admin | Posted at: April 23rd, 2009 | Posted in Technology Outsourcing

The world of Virtual Assistance has evolved from providing basic administrative and clerical support to handling increasingly complex tasks for clients. Today’s virtual assistants are increasingly becoming a gateway and a liaison between the client and the other specialized resources within their company. One area where this model can really gain traction is in addressing the growing technology pains for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs).

An SME can have myriad of technology needs, which are sometimes as diverse as for a large corporation, though obviously smaller in scale. These requirements can be generally divided into two categories. Firstly there are “must-have” needs such as email and desktop support. The second category includes applications in areas such as CRM or BPM (Business Process Management), which help make these companies more productive, more informed, and more responsive to the changing world. It’s this second category where SMEs have generally lagged the larger corporations in adoption for obvious reasons. The SMEs do not have the scale to invest in human resources, software, and consulting cost to implement these solutions. A lot of times SMEs are busy just trying to manage their must-have technology needs that they don’t get time to seriously think more about incorporating technology solutions to streamline their businesses.

However, during last few years, the environment has become increasingly favorable for SMEs to start looking into incorporating more technology into their daily business tasks. Firstly there is the rise and acceptance of open-source technologies as a viable alternative to more expensive commercial software from companies like Oracle and SAP. LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) based technology stack provide robust frameworks on which we can build applications. Also available are open-source customizable applications that target certain verticals such as Joomla for Content Management or SugerCRM for Customer Relationship Management. The result is that the product development life cycles have been reduced drastically thus enabling fairly rapid development and deployment at a much lower cost.

Secondly the evolution of VA companies have provided these SMEs with one-stop shop where they can ask providers to look into operations, spot potential areas which can be automated, suggest particular existing or new applications that can fit the bill, and then make development resources available to develop and maintain those applications. Today’s crop of VA companies has amassed a strong knowledge base working with SMEs which they can leverage. Plus they can rely on in-house research teams to supplement their knowledge base when working with a particular company. Quite simply, this range of services is not available through specialized offshore development houses or dedicated technology consulting companies.

Combine the low cost of open-source or subscription based software with the flexibility of reasonably priced VA rate plans and you create a very attractive model for SMEs to speed up technology adoption and gain competitive edge – at a time when they need it the most.

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Virtual Collaboration to keep your Back-Office running

Posted by: admin | Posted at: April 13th, 2009 | Posted in Virtual Assistant Services

The age of virtual reality has arrived! We have seen a gradual but steady development in human psyche as well as technological advancements that have led humans to push the envelope in terms of how we use virtual systems. Take for example the online gaming industry — you have millions if not tens of millions of people connected in a virtual gaming arena. The experience is life like, yet safe in your living room. You can not only beat your opponent from Germany; 6 time zones away; you can even talk to him on the game system.

With economic pressures looming large these days, businesses have stretched their office boundaries to virtually include the entire globe. One such phenomenon is the Virtual Office Services. These companies have been operating as small niche players, typically a single working mom would be the owner of such company. The services offered were faxing, calendaring and sending emails etc. But with the advent of secure Internet communications, seamless availability of office and productivity tools (that you use every day), these companies now offer large scale services that not only relieve your staff, it dramatically improves the way you are used to doing business. Offshore companies have tens or hundreds of educated staff members offering a wide range of service portfolios.

All of the above hinges on how effective the ‘Virtual Collaboration’ is between you and your virtual service company. The mainstay is the initial dialog; simply put — how well can you define your needs and requirements! These companies are nimble and flexible in turning around with a viable solution at very affordable prices. Virtually anything that can either be digitized and processed on a computer is something that you can offload to a Virtual Assistant or a Virtual Back Office Consultant.

Try to push the envelope today and enjoy the benefits of cost savings while staying focused on your core business!

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