The Outsourcing Expert
__________________________________________________________________ Do What You Do Best, Outsource The Rest!
And How Not Paying For This Service Will Cost You In Both Time & Money
THIS IS NOT A SALES PROMO: As I stated at the bottom of this article, I am in no way (at the moment) interested in getting into the “Business to individual” service providing. Enjoy the Sales-free read..
READING TIME: 9 MINUTES
following article will briefly describe my personal experiences with virtual assistants (VA), and why I feel they are beneficial if not necessary to assist both young and old professionals alike. You don’t need to make six figures to be able to afford your on VA as you will see. Now let me show you how I transformed my work life, became more productive & earned more by outsourcing a good deal of my personal & work chores/tasks to teams of personal assistants halfway around the world.
Getting a Virtual Assistant marks the moment that you learn how to give orders and become Commander instead of the commanded. It is small scale training wheels for learning remote management & communication. It is time to learn how to be the boss!
Most of us do not need a VA. That being said, having one will not only free up your time, it will allow you to take control of your life like you have never imagined while teaching you the best managerial skills that can only be taught by living it out. It is understandable that many of you may be “scared” of the fact that someone else has all of this information about you, and what about fraud, or poor work? The fact is your information is most likely safer with these people (who are heavily screened and monitored) than it is swiping your debit card at the local store.
Now there is no excuse to always be “too busy for that”, whatever “that” may be…
Shop around. Do not hire an assistant solely on price. You may have heard people hiring assistants for $3.00/hour, well not anymore… I first started out w/ a VA in India for $4.40/hour. After a few weeks I switched to a lady in the Philippines for $2.85/hour. Now I use Michelle, a Canadian who lives in British Columbia for just under $35/hour.
Her system is perfect: She takes care of highly sensitive items such as paying bills, arguing w/ phone/credit card companies/407 ETR, checking & replying to voicemail and emails. All other tasks she subcontracts out to her team of five other VA scattered around the world. Each one specializing in a different area of competence. What does that mean to me? It means I have a team of highly competent and qualified individuals working for me, with one point of contact: my fellow Canadian! It also means that Michelle’s $35/hour fee is actually more like $5.83/hour considering the workload completed in that time.
To date, I have not spent more than $870 per month in even my most craziest times. A breakdown of actual work numbers:
total hours worked each month by the entire VA Team on Jason’s behalf: 150 hours
150 divided by 8 (working hours in the workday) = 18.75
For $870/month, I receive almost 19 days of work!
Would you free up 19 days of work each month for just $29.01 a day? Almost a no-brainer..
Which brings me to my next point. Try a few assistants out on “test runs” before hiring your VA. This testing should cost you no more than $150 and a few hours of your time.
If you plan on having a VA overseas, make sure you ask for one who has exceptional english skills due to some phone work being needed (even if it’s not). Also, if you do not have some form of VOIP phone service, now might be the time to look into it. I prefer skype since it is not only connected to my computer and home phone, but also on my cellphone & iPod (that’s right, iPod). The last thing you want to do is to find out your phone bill kills any savings you have made by sourcing overseas. My 10,000 minutes per month plan from Skype cost just $30 per year, and if the other person has Skype (almost all VA’s do) then its free!
Do not get your VA to do any task that does not achieve a specific and measurable goal. This step gets you to start thinking/realizing what is truly important to achieving your desired results. Make sure that you give your VA specific time lines for each task. If you are giving them multiple tasks at the same time, make sure to prioritize them. Also, make sure that you are very clear with your instructions. This is no time to try and impress people with your fancy words. Write or speak to your VA at the second to fourth grade level (making sure that your orders can only be interpreted in one way).
Another beauty of this is that lingering unimportant tasks will soon vanish into thin air as soon as someone else is being paid to do them. Unless something is well defined and important, no one should do it, even your VA. Also, learn to 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 money!
Tip from Bill Gates: “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.”
Don’t get frustrated if something goes wrong… It will. This is all part of the learning process.
If I can do something better than an assistant, then why should I pay them at all?
Because the goal is to free your time so you can focus on bigger and better things, even if you don’t know what those things are at the moment… It is necessary to realize that you can always do something more cheaply yourself. This doesn’t mean that you should spend your time doing it… Like Tim Ferriss says; “If you spend your time doing something for $25 per hour that someone else will do for $10 per hour, it is simply a poor use of resources”. It is important to take baby steps toward having others do work for you, few do it, which is why so few people are living their ideal lifestyle”.
Having my team of virtual assistants has been a lifesaver. It has allowed me to do the work of multiple people, in less time per month than most high-level business professionals do per week. I rarely work more than 3-4 days per week or wake up before 10:30 am on the days I do work, but that does not seem to matter since my team of assistants have been working around the clock on my behalf anyways.
All this freedom, even with the restraints of running not one, but two businesses and consulting for numerous others is not a fantasy. I have raised the amount I earn hourly from double digits to three & on occasion four digits per hour. All for around a $11,000 price tag per year. There is no membership to join, no personal coach to hire. These are the facts, do what you would like with them. If you have a good business mind you can even get everything I have described for FREE.
Although I mentioned the price tag is near $11,000 per year for this, in all actuality, I have come to the conclusion that without this team of VA’s it would actually cost me over $40,000 per year, and 1,800 hours, or 225 days, or over 11 months of working (take your pick) in lost time where I am not being as productive as I can be, thus losing untold new business opportunities and diminishing my quality of life. How stupid would I be if I didn’t pay a measly $11,000 to save myself 11 months of work?
I will touch on how I actually get my VA’s to pay for themselves, but for a more detailed explanation you will have to wait for a future blog posting.
I actually had my VA in India create a number of websites (five in total at the moment) that are set up to push people to Amazon.com and buy their products. This is called being an Amazon Associate. What I did was have these websites made, advertising the products of Amazon.com. My VA in the Philippines is in charge of allocating advertising money to sites like Facebook & Google. Money is earned when people click on ads, or when they actually buy the product from Amazon. You can earn as much as $1.00 per click and up to 15% when a product is bought.
To date, I have been able to consistently bring in enough money to cover my advertising to drive people to these websites (roughly 50-60 percent of the profits), pay my Virtual Assistants, & still be able to throw $20-$30K into other business ventures. If you have the entrepreneurial mindset, you don’t need to pay for your lifestyle, let your lifestyle pay for you!
In a funny way, I am glad that the majority of you reading this will do nothing more than just that, read this and do nothing. If everyone had their own personal virtual assistants, then it may not be the great deal it is right now… So for the few of you that will take the next step in hiring your very own VA, congratulations on joining an elite group of individuals who are taking control of their lives & future by letting go of many of their time consuming but necessary tasks in search for their ideal lifestyle.
Update:
I have received over 100 pieces of email in just the 2 days from the two places I’ve posted this article. It is for this reason I would like to quickly clear up a few things:
1. I encourage you to take my advice & try out a number of providers before you make your choice!
2. My company’s focus is on business to business, not business to individual. Therefor we are not currently in the market to sell the services of one assistant at a time. It would better suit you to try one of our partners or competitors in this situation. send a quick email to info@simpleoutsourcing.ca and they can provide you with some great VA providers.
3. I can’t stress this enough… You WILL face problems in the first few weeks with any new VA. What you should remember is that most of the problems are usually a result of YOU not being clear & decisive enough. This will take a little practice on your part.
