How I Will Be Rich

Archive for August, 2007

This past weekend I attended my great friend, Robert’s officer commissioning ceremony for the Marine Corps. After the short ceremony, everyone had brunch together where we all chatted and got to know a little about each other. After meeting several of his Marine friends, I noticed that during conversation with each person, I was asked what I do for work, or if I go to school. These seem to be pretty standard questions when it comes to meeting people for the first time, or during any other typical conversation. After the third or fourth person asking the same question, I got to thinking, “Is all we really think of ourselves is what we do for work?” Is our identity solely formed from the job we spend doing forty-plus hours a week?

There has to, and is, a much larger, brighter answer than that of stating your position at work. A question about what you do for a living doesn’t have to solely mean a career. How could we cover up all the fun and meaningful things we do in life with the day in and day outs of the stressful work life? I would much rather answer the question by saying I love to run and bicycle. That spending time with my family and friends doesn’t only have to be kept for the weekend, but a daily meeting. By shutting out the qualities in life that mean the most only seems to hurt us, more and more.

I believe when someone asks you, “So what do you do?” Most people respond with the assumption that they are asking about work, so you shoot them the line, “I am a ______.” A lot of the times I feel that we are not really proud of whatever position we stated, so you should ask yourself how truly meaningful that job feels to you. Do you get a sense of pride? Is there any guilt when saying where you work; or do you want to say, “I am only a ______.” If this is the case, this little defense isn’t helping anything but hiding the fact that what you shape your life as is something you personally don’t love. We cannot have a true passion in life if we wholly mold ourselves from the working title we state to the people we meet (unless you are actually doing something you fully enjoy, which is rare. Bravo!).

Step out of the box for a minute and go over how you’re seeing your life run. If all you do is work and dread every minute of it, maybe you should make a change. If you enjoy it and think it’s the best thing that’s ever happened since sliced bread, then keep on chugging away! But overall, we shouldn’t think that we are our jobs; there is a lot more to us than that.

I run a multi-million dollar company. I have a shop manager who runs the factory and makes sure everything is running properly and everything is on schedule and of good quality. I also have an office manager who makes sure the office is continually running smoothly. I oversee it all and make sure that both are doing their job. I link the factory to the office so that everyone constantly knows what is going on with everyone else and when customers call, the office knows what the factory is doing. Last week my shop manager became sick and I sent him home. I was now responsible for quality, cost and schedule in the factory and the link between the office and shop. Needless to say, it was a rough week.

A week like last week really makes me think about how handy an assistant would be to help with some of the smaller day to day things that I do. I didn’t manage to get any blog posts in for a couple days because I was basically all over the place to trying to do the jobs of two people.

Anyway, I sent in a request for a Virtual Assistant over at GetFriday and received an e-mail back describing the waiting period and the steps from this point. Here is a copy of the e-mail. (I have removed names and numbers).

Hi Matt,

Thank you for your interest in Get Friday’s services. We can handle what you have asked for. I am sure you will be glad you picked us.

Please review our tariff plans here

Please download the membership form

1) Fill, sign and fax the first 2 pages to our toll free fax numbers – USA: xxx-xxx-xxxx (if living in North America) or UK: xx-xxx-xxx-xxxx (if living in Europe). Signing up will require your billing information as well. It is a secure soft fax with limited access to only supervisory personnel. People in other countries can fax it to one of these numbers as well.

2) We provide a 7 day trial period for you to evaluate our service. If you are not happy with the service, you can cancel the membership on or before 7 days and no charges shall be made. If you do continue, then charges apply from day ONE.

3) Once you send the fax, you can e mail us and inform us or we will get in touch with you quickly.

4) From the next month on, our monthly billing will be done in advance on the 5th of the month.

5) We will provide usage reports on a weekly basis.

6) If you are not satisfied with the service for any reason and want to cancel it, you need to send us an e mail or fax. Termination or change of plan after the trial period will require a minimum of 30 days advance notice.

You will be assigned a primary assistant on signup who will be responsible for your tasks and shall be available 5 days a week. Though we work in shifts and there would be someone to take messages or take up urgent requirements – 24 hours a day, six days a week. We are not available on Sundays and the second and fourth Saturday of every month.

Due to a sudden increase in business, we currently have a 3 (three) week waiting period between the receipt of your membership form and the start of service. I apologize for the inconvenience this may cause.

Someone will get back to you within two business day of receiving your membership form.

If you are convinced that we can handle your tasks and have made ourselves clear, please go ahead and send us your membership form to avoid further delay. This is only because your waiting period will start on the day we acknowledge the receipt of the same.

However if you have any specific questions that we haven’t addressed then you could send us a mail which would take about 4 days for us to respond.

I do appreciate your bearing with us during this time of growth.

Regards,
name removed
Support team.

I wonder if this sudden increase in growth is due to popularity of the Tim Ferris book and the My Outsourced Life article. Who knows. But good for them. I can’t wait to get going with this.

-M

We were, once again, featured in the Carnival of Personal Finance for my post about ETFs Vs Mutual Funds. The Carnival can be found at Free Money Finance this week. Head over and check out all the great articles.

In anticipation of our new project, I have scoured the internet looking for everything and anything I can about outsourcing, virtual assistants and various firms that offer these tasks. Surprisingly, after the success of the Tim Ferriss book, “The 4-Hour Work Week“, there are still not many people or websites talking about all the benefits of outsourcing. Most people still believe that it is something better left to huge corporations who can afford to open manufacturing plants in third world countries and pay pennies to our dollar. That is just no longer true. So many people, especially in the United States, are benefiting from the tasks that foreign outsourcing can provide. We’re not talking just large companies either. We’re talking about people using virtual assistants to outsource their normal activities in their day to day life.

I have a list of sites that I have found that have been mentioned to provide assistance remotely. some of these are companies that just offer programming and web site creation services, some offer pretty much anything.

• Brickwork – Seems to be able to do pretty much any sort of task but tends to be aimed more towards helping with business operations (spreadsheets, powerpoints, and office work)
  
• ELance - Offers any sort of service you can ask for. You present your task at hand and various people will bid for the opportunity to help complete that task.
• Get Friday – Offers a virtual assistant that can pretty much help in any area of your life, from helping with office paperwork to reading bedtime stories to children.
• YMII (Your Man in India) – A company that offers remote services for people with needs in India. Not so much what we are looking for.
• Guru.Com – Another company that looks like it is capable of handling almost anything business related.
• Rent A Coder – A place where you post your software related needs and businesses will bid to code them for you.
• Global Solutions India – A company that offers design related solutions. They will do graphic design, website design, brochure design and more.
  
• FinTax Experts – Offers Tax preparation and book keeping services for a fraction of the price of domestic offerings.
• ScriptLance – Another company just like Rent A Coder. They allow people to bid on your software related needs.
  

If you have read The 4-Hour Work Week, you have probably heard YMII, or Your Man in India, and Brickwork. Those are the two companies that are discussed. Upon further research, I have learned that Get Friday and YMII are essentially the same company. YMII, for the most part, handles tasks that need to be accomplished in India. It is mainly for people from India that are currently living in the United States and need things done for them back at home. I believe the book kind of mis-states what their services are. This is a company that you would go through if you need to purchase real estate in India or if you need a ride from the airport in India and various other tasks of that nature. It is actually the company, Get Friday, that provides the Virtual Assistants that Tim Ferris describes in his book. If you were to contact YMII and ask for help with a research project that you are currently involved in, they will just refer you over to Get Friday.

These are the outsource firms that I have found to work with. We are making a list of tasks that we can send some of these companies so that we can get to know their processes and how well everything comes out. If anyone has any specific tasks that they would like to see performed, please let us know. Remember these places are pretty much capable of doing anything in which their presence is not required.

Let the fun begin…

-M

This is a joint post by both Matt Wolfe and Joe Fier.

Joe wanted to elaborate more on his previous post, “Freeing Your Mind Through Outsourcing.” and I felt that my post, “We Gotta Mind the 9-5” was closely related. I guess the main idea of the two posts is that life is hectic. Both Joe and I work two jobs, go to school, author a blog, have family and relationships to tend to and need to find time to sleep in between. It gets a little overwhelming at times. We’ve got to decide which of these tasks mean the most to us and prioritize accordingly. Joe wrote about the idea of outsourcing in his post and this can allow you to have the ability to expand the hours in your day. You can, essentially, put endless tasks on your plate. You can just load up that to-do list, front and back and not have to worry so much about how you’ll be able to complete it all. The most difficult hurdle to overcome while thinking of outsourcing is that it allows almost everyone the ability to have an extra helping hand. It can take that sleep element out because while you’re catching up on the ZZZs, you’ve got someone pounding away at some of those tasks on the list.

Joe and I have decided to conduct a little experiment. We have chosen to see how simple it is to establish and work with a remote personal assistant. While we venture through this plan, we’ll document what we learn and show the benefits and drawbacks of what can come from outsourcing. For all those people out there who have read and enjoyed The 4-Hour Work Week but are a little too reserved to give some of the ideas a try, we’ll be your guinea pig. So follow along because we will document everything we come across in this little experiment.