In a recent article, I touched on Timothy Ferrissa?? book The 4 Hour Work Week. While I cana??t say I agreed with the practicality of all of his suggestions, I did find some of his ideas very interesting and figured Ia??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, theya??re like a secretary a?? providing administrative / clerical support to a busy executive. They can do whatever any assistant can do as long as they dona??t have to be physically present. So while you couldna??t have them pick up your dry cleaning, theya??d be more than happy to research an upcoming presentation for you.
The Search Begins
Ferrissa?? book mentions a couple resources - Brickwork, Your Man In India (YMII), & 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. Ferrissa?? footsteps. My initial requests for information from both Brickwork and YMII were met with requests for me to a??please be patient due to a recent upsurge of customer inquiries.a??
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.
Herea??s this guy. Hea??s extremely well educated. He speaks multiple languages. Ia??m confident his IQ was 10X that of mine a?? I know, I know thata??s probably not saying a lot. But the whole time Ia??m having to ask him to repeat himself because I just couldna??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 a?? 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 Ia??d be assigned a VA (Virtual Assistant) within 3 weeks. Thata??s right a?? 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 wasna??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 whata??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. Ferrissa?? 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 ther $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 werena??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 werena??t suitable for, and they provided intelligent responses to any questions I asked.
Sponsors
HOT STORIES
