I read the four hour work week by Tim Ferriss a little over a year ago and the book influenced my life immediately. For years now I have concentrated on improving myself by reading and taking courses to increase my knowledge. This has helped build my confidence. Confidence, is a major portion of anyone’s ability to succeed. I find that once you feel comfortable with understanding a procedure or how to do a function, you are not afraid of failure. Risk aversion is not something that I liked doing throughout my life, but with constant practice and positive reinforcement I have become better acquainted with the dreaded demon of risk. In a way, I can thank Tim Ferriss for this, without the 4HWW I would not have traveled down the road of internet business.
Although I have always been a successful in my career, it was like a light being turned on after reading “my Bible” as I like to refer to the 4HWW. Those of you that read Entrepreneur magazine Joel Holland has an excellent article about going “virtual” with your work force. Joel mentions how Tim Ferriss is “an avid proponent of virtual operations,” and of all the gems that I gathered from the 4HWW, the knowledge of using a virtual assistant or “VA” has helped me tremendously. You can read the article here http://www.entrepreneur.com/magazine/entrepreneur/2009/may/201180.html
A primary function of my job has always been to manage people and the procedures that they perform. To do this well, you have to make sure that you have a system for follow up and constantly monitor benchmarks and metrics. Communication is a key component to managing anything and I foolishly felt that utilizing a VA would be easy for me. I was wrong, and the reason for that was I did not communicate expectations in writing clear enough.
Tim gave me the tools, I needed to implement them. As I began to start my online businesses, I hired my first VA to do research for me. Using the link in the book, I immediately started on elance (www.elance.com). I opened my account within minutes and began my search for a research assistant. A strange thing occurred during this first hire, I felt alive and almost giddy. I couldn’t help but feel that I could now consider myself a true internet entrepreneur. For those of you that are not familiar with Elance, it gives you the ability to hire anyone for basically any service and since my first hire; I have continued to use them on a regular basis. What I learned with my first hire was that although, I felt my communication was clear. It was nothing compared to how I needed to communicate with a VA.
See, the thing you need to remember is that communicating through e-mail and chat rooms takes a little getting used too. Tim details this in the book by setting clear boundaries for the VA’s to follow and I completely agree. Clear boundary’s and what is expected is not only a good practice to adhere too while dealing with “VA’s” it should be something you strive to do each day. I recommend the following steps when putting together information needed for a job bid.
- Write out an overview of the project before posting on E-Lance. This helps you to clarify it on paper by gathering all the stray thoughts and really keeps the project organized. The issue you will have with a VA, especially one located in India, etc. is that at times you may have a lag in communication of up to 12 hours if you are on the east coast of the USA. This lag will exist until you find a capable VA that you are able to hopefully hire full time. (That’s right, I said full time; check out replace myself.com for more information. Just click on the link on the right side of my page for his free information on how to do this, it works, trust me!)
- Let the overview sit for a day, then read it out loud to yourself. It will help you spot areas where your communication needs to be clearer. You have to think about this as if you were explaining it to a twelve year old. If you really want to test it out, open a Google document and utilize the spell checker to gather the Flesch-Kincaid score; this tells you the readability of your writing. You can find out more information about the Flesch-Kincaid scoring here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch-Kincaid_Readability_Test The clearer you are, the better the results of your project.
- Set clear benchmarks, don’t be afraid to write something like;
“I need you to research for three hours, stop and send me the results in an excel spread sheet properly formatted with column headings. Do not continue until I give you the go ahead for the next stage of the project.”
When you do this, it gives you the practice you need on giving direction. Something every good manager/entrepreneur needs to be able to do. You would be surprised how many people do not like to do this because they feel that it may hurt someone’s feelings. However, to be successful, you need to be clear and understood.
Once you feel comfortable, post your job for bidding. If you want to keep costs low, I suggest you post your job to the Philippines, and India. There are some very telling differences between the results you will get from the two different areas, replace myself.com explains this much better than anyone I have heard so far. Once the bids start rolling in, the fun begins.
Check the feedback on the people or companies bidding. Read the scores they receive, also, look for how much repeat business that a bidder has retained. It is a great barometer for how happy the previous customers were with the quality of work they received. Once you weed out the bad from good, really interview the bidders. See how they respond to particular questions you pose. Also, have them repeat the scope of the project and the benchmarks to make sure that they clearly understand.
After I hired my first VA, I couldn’t stop. All of the things that I thought I had to do myself, gone. By utilizing VA’s for starting my internet business, I was able to maximize my time and expand the reach I had to get things done. Once you get rolling, there doesn’t seem to be anything that you can’t job out to these people. The key is finding one or two that you trust. This way, you can teach them your procedure lists for running your business.
I like to describe working with VA’s as being the ring leader at a circus. You have to check and verify different aspects of the work they are doing, pull a string here, adjust something there. All while sipping a pina colada on the beach. It’s a beautiful thing. I hope this helps you on your journey to financial freedom that doing business over the internet can bring, it’s a beautiful thing.
