How I Will Be Rich

I was surfing the web the other day and you’ll never guess what I found. It was a blog post called My 4-Hour Work Week Experiment over at a blog called Small Business Guru. I thought this was very interesting seeing as Joe and I had originally planned an outsourcing experiment. This guy has actually done what we were planning on doing. He looked at three outsourcing companies in particular. He looked at Your Man in India, Brickwork and Elance.

He basically found that:

• Brickwork was not at all cost effective. It was going to be about $600 per month.
• YMII had communication issues and didn’t quite produce the results that he had hoped for and
• He found a company on Elance called Kaya Systems that he just loved.

Joe and I still plan on using a virtual assistant to get a few tasks done and do some experimenting. This blog post, however, has probably affected who we will experiment with. Chances are, Brickwork will be a little more expensive than what we can hang with and if they had issues with YMII (which is actually Get Friday), we probably will as well. I’m thinking about giving Kaya Systems a shot and also investigating some of the other companies available through ELance.

I’m a huge fan of Tim Ferriss’s Book but I’m starting to wonder about the validity of some of his outsourcing claims. I’ve realized that these outsourcing companies are out there but are they really as affordable as claimed?

Anyway, the point is, go check out that blog post if you had any interest in our outsourcing experiment but feel like you were left hangin. (We’re sorry, we will get back to it).

-M

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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

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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

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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.

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