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What is outsourcing?
Why is it useful to you?

My History of Outsourcing

defining outsourcing processWhat is outsourcing to me, personally?

  1. A fun hobby
  2. A useful and effective method to leverage my time
  3. A way to accelerate my business and projects

It has been more than 3 years that I actively work with virtual assistants and outsource online jobs.

Read about the History of Outsourcing in a nutshell and my background with outsourcing.

Definition of outsourcing

Depending on if you are a private employer, a provider (or employee) or a big corporation, there are different ways to define outsourcing.

My answer to the question “What is outsourcing?” in a nutshell:

  • Outsourcing is relaying a specific task to someone else via internet, one who is able to do the work faster and more efficient than you.
  • Your valuable time is freed by outsourcing time-intensive and/or repetitive tasks, allowing you to use it more effectively: to make more money or to enjoy freedom from stress.
  • The most expensive commodity you can have is time. Outsourcing is a way to “buy free time”.

Two things made outsourcing possible:

  1. High speed internet, connecting the world’s communication
  2. Globalization, which makes it possible to livein the US, but hire someone from India or other countries at local wages.

Pros

It’s clear that there are many advantages of outsourcing tedious work so that you are free to do other things.
  • Everything that can be done on the computer can be outsourced.
  • You gain more free time
  • You still get more done
  • Committing to a VA will make you focus harder on getting results
  • If you are too lazy to type instructions, you can dictate and record voicemails.

Cons

I’ll be honest with you: outsourcing is useful for many, not only bosses of big corporations. But it is not for everyone. There are some disadvantages of outsourcing  that you should be warned from.
  • You should be prepared to deal with people from other countries. There can be issues of language barriers and cultural differences.
  • You need to closely examine all aspects of outsourcingethically,in order to keep a clear conscience. It’s easy to take the low prices of most freelancers in poorer countries for granted.
  • You cannot outsource everything. Although you can get close, like the author Tim Ferris in his famous book about his Four Hour Work Week.

It is not about taking your job away!

Note that I am not talking about offshoring, i.e. taking jobs away from anyone here on
ideal-helper.com. I honestly believe that most normal, non-entrepreneur individuals could greatly profit from a personal assistant at their side.

If your boss in the US decides to introduce call center offshore outsourcing to his firm, this is another completely
different discussion.

Want to try out the waters without risks?

lee Kaun Yew's famous quotation about outsourcing

There is one big platform that allows you to “play around” with
outsourcing small and often fun tasks to other people is fiverr.com.

It is one of the first sites that allows you to let others
work for you on specific tasks – for the small price of five dollars (hence the
name “fiverr”).

What is outsourcing 101 for beginners? Most probably Fiverr.

You may be a simple employee right now. But you can be your own boss now,
if you want to.

What is outsourcing from the perspective of a freelancer?

You can use your day to day skills as a provider or employer. What may seem very simple to you may be invaluable to someone else.

  • Perhaps you are an expert of making videos and you do that for fun or as a hobby.Oryou have mastered how to render, analyze and optimize photos and can do
    this “in your sleep”.
  • The possibilities are only limited by your skills

Do you think you can outsource your skills?

Your motto as a successful freelancer should be:

“I am doing this service for you. If I don’t successfully do your work, you will get your money back. I will only get paid for good work.”

Everyone can participate in the outsourcing world!

For example:

Do you go hiking every weekend and you know everything of “your forest”? Do you think your knowledge would be useful for someone else?

I am sure it could be. And if you don’t find anyone who needs this knowledge directly around you, you can start and create your own website business about your everyday knowledge.

This is exactly what I did here on ideal-helper.com.

You can also voice out your opinion and experiences to a writer, a website owner or a blogger and get paid for your insights.

You wouldn’t believe what simple stuff you can do for an employer.

Go ahead and laugh when you see what was my first assignment when I started outsourcing to oDesk. To my defense, I am not really a web savvy at that time.

Think about it. There are people out there doing Data Entry jobs full time. You can bet that they are Excel, Word and office wizards.

You don’t want to invest the same
time into mastering a data entry skill if you can cheaply hire someone who has
already done so – and is burning to start working for you.

If you need some hard numbers…

There are some interesting outsourcing statistics out there. What is even more interesting to me personally is that there are more down-to-earth facts.

I interviewed some freelancers all around the world and discussed personal questions with them. This gave me interesting insights into their answer to the question “What is outsourcing?” that sometimes you will see that there are really differences apart from what you would expect. It was interesting to get a look “behind the curtains” of every different countries.

Especially, the comparison of the costs of living from different countries is always an eye-opener.

Outsourcing Experts

Suvidh marwaha

Suvidh Marwaha

Suvidh is a CEO from the outsourcing service TasksEveryDay. He shares his insights about what outsourcing means for him and his service in an insightful interview video.

What is outsourcing – in action?

In my mini-blog below, I’ll showcase real-life outsourcing experiences.

Feel free to join the discussion or share your own experiences with virtual assistants below. From time to time, when I make a general observation or notable experience with my outsourcing, I’ll also put the article below.

 






How did it work out for you when you tried outsourcing?

Do you have an interesting story to tell about one of your collaborations with someone from the other end of the globe?

Let everyone know about it! You can build your personal blog post right here.

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Tell Us About Your Outsourcing Experience!

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Using Trello as a project management system with your virtual assistants

Trello is a project management online application where you can manage different tasks assigned to your virtual assistant or a team of VAs. After using other project and employee management applications and comparing them with Trello, we found it better than other applications like Asana. Using Trello is especially great if you have a flexible team of virtual assistants. This is how it looks for us:

Here are some of the major reasons why we preferred Trello over Asana.

  1. Free to use.
  2. User-friendly – Easy to work with
  3. Drag and Drop system
  4. Asana is more complicated than Trello.
  5. Asana is good for those teams who follow strict deadlines on each task. However, we can still set a deadline within Trello if we want to.
  6. You can see the complete history of any task within the same task /card

The downside

There is no dashboard where you can see reports and ongoing work progress in Trello, but this is still possible with Trello if you follow the process in a perfect order.

How to best use Trello for managing your virtual assistants

So here is our best suggestions on how you can use Trello as a content management system.

Let’s suppose you’re working with only one virtual assistant at the moment.

Create two boards in Trello.

  1. Virtual Assistant To-do
  2. Employer To-to

Virtual Assistant to-do has three lists

  1. Low priority: You will put all low priority tasks here
  2. High priority: All high priority tasks can be placed here
  3. Work in Process: Either VA or employer will move the tasks to this list based on their priorities

Employer to-do has two lists

  1. To-do: All tasks where your virtual assistant needs any feedback from you, or it’s pending on you will be moved here.
  2. Pending for validation: After completing any task, the VA will move the card here for your review. So you will review his work and either archive the card if it’s good or re-move to your VA’s boards if something is not finished.

Working mechanism

As mentioned above that you’ll move all of tasks that are supposed to be performed by your virtual assistant, he will move tasks from high priority list to Work in Process list. This will give you an overview of what tasks he is working on at the moment.

When he will finish a task, he will move it either to Pending for Validation or to your to-do list based on its status.

When you have time, you will only have to go to your board and there you will find all the tasks that are pending on your end. When you review those tasks, if the task is done you can archive that. If it’s still not complete, then you can move it back to one of your virtual assistant’s lists.

How to move tasks from one board to another

Moving tasks from one board to another is easy. You need to follow this process:

  1. Open the task
  2. From actions click “Move”
  3. Select the appropriate board
  4. Select the appropriate list

trello mechanism

More amazing Trello features

Here are some more features that we can use in order to use Trello better.

  • You can add members to different tasks
  • If you check “subscribe” you’ll get notified whenever any changes/updates made to the card.
  • There is a checklist feature which allows to bifurcate the task into different steps, so you can use that to create and follow those tasks which have multiple steps
  • Every task has all its actions described at the bottom
  • You can set due dates to those tasks which have strict deadlines
  • For big projects, You can create more boards.
  • You can add different labels to different tasks
  • You can search tasks within the search bar

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Fire your Virtual Assistant when he is not the perfect fit for you – What you have to know

Firing an EmployeeHiring an assistant is easy; firing one is a big challenge. Whenever you run into the situation that you need to fire your virtual assistant, because

  1. He performed poorly
  2. Your budget is running out
  3. The project is not successful
  4. Life gets in the way of handling an assistant
  5. You lose interest…

…then you have a hard decision to make.

Honestly, it’s hard to let your virtual assistant go because you

  • took time to actively build trust and rapport with them
  • invested time and money into their training
  • have to think about how you would feel if you were let go from your own job

In the end, you paying a virtual assistant is your own business decision. After a fair time of notice you must be able to save your expenses. At any time of working with an assistant, you must be in the position to control your finances.

In other words: without the agreed work load from your assistant, he is not entitled to your money with no strings attached.

When you notify your assistant, dependent on how closely you know each other, explain your reasons. However, you don’t need to “negotiate your way out”. Don’t put them off your assignment from one day to the other, of course. Let them know beforehand so that they can look for another project on their own.

Ideally, phase out the time they work for you gradually over a few weeks.

Hire assistants to boost your online business or personal projects. But don’t burn money more than you want and feel comfortable. Always stay in control.

A practical example – Ending the contract with a personal assistant when it did not work out well

I have worked with a full time VA and delayed firing him even though I knew he was not doing a good job. That has cost me around €3000. Recently, I have hired a personal assistant and was not about to repeat past mistakes.

Firing a VA the right way = minimize your losses

Make no mistake: firing a Virtual Assistant always a loss of your money or your time. But if you manage it right, you can minimize the losses. Here is how I kept my losses at 30€ for a personal assistant.

  • Followed best practices when hiring him (limited hours he can bill for, test task, good preparation)
  • Kept close supervision on him (you can do that myself, in this case I have relied on my experienced hiring manager
  • Tried encouraging, motivating and clarifying confusion before pulling the plug – you never know if it doesn’t work out well after all

By the time he has stopped responding, you can bet he has already given up inside on my project.
When I was sure it was not working out, we reached out a last time. After that, we removed shared assets and accesses, and ended the contract with him.

Contacting the virtual assistant before firing him
Contacting the virtual assistant before firing him

 

Ending the contract in time to minimize your losses
Ending the contract in time to minimize your losses

 

Here is the report from my hiring manager.
Here is the report from my hiring manager

 

Provide objective feedback to the VA after ending the contract.
Provide objective feedback to the VA after ending the contract.

 

Take away lessons when you need to fire your virtual assistant

Learn from it, make it better next time, don’t let it pull you down

In my interview with Eric, we also touch on the emotional side of firing an assistant from a business owner’s perspective. Key lessons to take away are:

  • Don’t feel you need to continue paying due to emotional attachment, if the results are not good.
  • Clearly communicate to your assistant what will get them fired, or when you are not happy.
  • Manage expectations and try to keep an objective perspective about your work relationship with the virtual assistant.

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Turning my 6+ Years of Outsourcing Experience into a System You Can Use

A lot has been going in behind the scenes on Ideal Helper. We have moved to WordPress. (If you are a SBI owner and want to move to WordPress, I am happy to help.)

I have started studying with new resources in order to help you better profit from my experiences in outsourcing to Virtual Assistants (as an employer or an assistant).

And my VA and I are working in the background on setting up systems (quite a lot of them, actually) that would make it easy for anyone to get started with VAs, hiring, training them with my screen videos, having the right tools and approaches and so on. (It is not publicly available yet)

Ideal Helper Business System preview

In my mind, this is both the best way for me to record my knowledge for myself for the future as well as for you to get the best training possible without investing 6 years of trials and error and more than 10 000$ to get where I am.

My question to you:

Is this interesting to you? Can you profit from video instructions on all aspects of outsourcing with VAs?

Including step by step instructions and insights into

  • The whole hiring process
  • Tools that are best used
  • Training to be given away to your VAs
  • Instructions on typical tasks like picture and video editing, research and transcription

It makes no sense for me to publish posts on outsourcing if they are not useful for you. It is my motivation to inspire you how awesome it is if you have a right hand person (or team) turning your thoughts, ideas and projects into reality. Sometimes literally overnight as you sleep.

This experience of getting results especially with my websites and online business way faster than if I would be working alone has been priceless to me. And it is the reason I have been continuing to outsource and will continue to do so as long as I can.

But where do you stand? Are you perhaps curious if this could be something for you? Are you confused because you don’t know what a Virtual Assistant is or can do for you?

Or are you perhaps a freelancer yourself and looking to learn how to best partner up with an employer that treats you fairly and with respect for a mutual win-win situation?

Please do share your thoughts with me in the comments below. I look forward to get to know you better.

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New WordPress design of my SBI website with the help of my Virtual Assistant

site design comparison after WordPress transfer

Ideal Helper moves to WordPress! After long years on a previous hosting platform (SBI or Site Build it), all the best lessons and news about working with VAs will be presented to you on a fresh design on WordPress.

Luckily, I don’t have to do this alone, and working with my VA on the setup of this WP is a bit like Christmas. I look at what I see, tell my VA what I wish for, and he makes it happen.

It would be doable on my own. But if you have an assistant taking care of detail-oriented work such as setting up plugins, researching documentation, playing with the code…

It’s hard not to lean back (and also focus on some other tasks, like working out content).

Pre-researched Themes for WordPress

Although my VA does lots of the work behind the scenes, the final decisions are left up to me. In this case, he researched the best WordPress themes along with alternatives for which sort of themes it should be. We went with Genesis after him comparing different alternatives.

Then, he gave me a choice of 5 good premium themes based on my budget and his assessment of the website’s content. Let me know in the comments if you are interested in his research and I can post it as an update to this post.

I went with the “Executive” theme you see right now (as of 2016) and purchased it. My hope is that the content is clearly readable and easy to find for you.

Installing the theme

To be honest, I just left this task to my VA as he is more adept in WordPress as I am right now. Since there was no problem for him, I assume the setup is pretty straightforward for anyone familiar with WP.

Setting up the page layout

Ideal Helper homepage old design
This was the previous design from this website when it was hosted on Site Build It.

As I want to optimize the layout for readability and especially the mobile format, I am not re-creating 1:1 the old design from Ideal Helper.

Although I was happy with that old design so far, I feel that the fresh design as you see it now makes the site look a bit more professional.

I believe that Virtual Assistants are professionals and their potential employers (you perhaps?) are also looking for a professional behaviour. That’s why a professional look is what I am shooting for.

Also, I felt that the previous design was a bit too “busy”. My goal now is that my site gives you a clear direction where to go next to reach your goal.

Reworking all the existing content

To move the content from one platform to another is not copy-paste easy, unfortunately. But it’s the perfect example of a task that should be handled by your virtual assistant. Of course, you can always do it yourself. Be prepared to work for a few weeks on nothing than optimizing and fine-tuning your content.

Or, you just train your assistant and let him do it.

Or, you simply contact us for a quote for doing it for you. This way, you don’t have any headache with hiring, managing and training your assistant.

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Finding a Solution for Internet Interruptions of my Filipino Virtual Assistant

by Francis

 

Jomvie catches up lost hours on the weekend - This is the exception
Jomvie catches up lost hours on the weekend – This is the exception

Internet connectivity problems, power outages, other incidents – my full time VA from the Philippines, Jomvie, has his share of troubles.
It’s important as an employer to be understanding when there is nothing you can do.

But it’s equally important to be creative and resourceful to find solutions when the situation is not unavoidable.

For a Virtual Employee – Inform your Employer of any Problems

Your Employer is planning on your work output. He has his projects in mind and hopes most of all on things going smoothly. Even though you might be troubled with a situation, it’s still important to squeeze in some time to let your boss know. Else, he is likely to make some wrong assumptions.

Here is what Jomvie wrote to me yesterday:

Hi Francis,

I wasn’t able to finish my shift yesterday due to a combined inevitable event yesterday. There was a very heavy storm that brought heavy rain and flooding and a power shortage. So, I can’t really go out to finish my shift.

Hoping for your kind consideration.

Best and Thanks,
Jomvie

For an employer – think of alternative tasks that can be done offline and of backup plans

Jomvie and I have discussed backup solutions for internet outages many times. From going to an internet coffee to considerations of a secondary internet connection. We also discussed issues of general power outages in the past.

Both are problems that come up regularly in the Philippines.

In my experience, only a minority of virtual assistants from this country try to use this as an excuse. But it’s hard to prove it either way because the productivity of an offline virtual assistant is hard to track. Although there are (paid) solutions for that.

Finding a solution together – for both employers and VAs

I believe you will profit from this discussion, if you are a VA or plan to hire one. Even if you (a VA) come from another country, you can still learn from this.

Different levels of calamity / problems

To you as a VA:
Dependent on how big the problem, you need to react differently.

    1. Really dangerous crisis:
      A taifun is flooding the streets. Houses are broken. There are causalities. What to do? Save yourself! Nothing more important than that. (I tell this because there is a story of a filipino VA who was sitting on the roof of his flooded house, writing to his employer from his laptop which he saved first, that he couldn’t take care of his shift today. That might be a bit extreme)

 

    1. Unable to work, unable go out:
      Heavy storms and rain make it dangerous or really difficult to go out. Your stuff or your house risks to be damaged. Getting a Taxi would be a big challenge. What to do? Stay put! Make sure your infrastructure is OK, and take care of important phone calls. When you just sit there and there is nothing you can do, work offline and take note of what you do. Log that time as offline time with a short explanation in your daily update later. (I touch on the importance of daily updates here.)

 

  1. A plain internet deconnection, no other problem:
    Try to get back the internet connection. If that’s impossible, assess how much longer you would need to work today. If it makes sense, go to a backup place or solution for getting internet. Let your employer know (for example via mobile phone).

In all of these cases, when the problem is over, be sure to reach your employer. He might already be worrying about you.

Let’s open the discussion!

There are many other aspects to this situation, but I want to open the discussion to Jomvie and all you readers. Feel free to jump in with your own opinions any time in the comments!

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Typhoons—A Part Of Life for Virtual Assistants from the Philippines

by Jomvie
(Francis’ Full-Time VA)

It was taken during the height of the onslaught of the storm (Glenda) going out of the Philippine Area of Responsibility (PAR) last August 1, 2014.
It was taken during the height of the onslaught of the storm (Glenda) going out of the Philippine Area of Responsibility (PAR) last August 1, 2014.

This is an audio recording of my thoughts regarding typhoons here in the Philippines. I find this topic relevant for employers outside of the country and never have been in this part of Southeast Asia. I hope this article will give an idea about the geographic attributes and weather conditions in the Philippines.

I just want to start by describing that this kind of natural occurrence is common here in our country.

The Philippines is hit by an average of 15-20 typhoons per year. And people, especially from the northern parts like the Luzon area as well as in the middle part, the Visayas area, are practically expecting typhoons to hit their area any time during the months of June to February.

Luckily, I live in the southern part, in the southern island of Mindanao wherein our place is rarely a landing point of typhoons.

In the last couple of years, I think, there were just a couple of typhoons that hit our area, but still it was considered to be a rare event here.

Because basically, when typhoons start in the Pacific ocean, they usually hit our country in the north-eastern parts of Mindanao, which is about 10 hours away from where I live; and it goes through the Visayas area and then to the Luzon area – where it also will be exiting the country going to Taiwan and the eastern part of China.

Now, going back to the experience of having such natural events here in our country, typhoons (particularly), I would say—in describing a typhoon you can imagine a really, really bad weather with strong winds which is mostly accompanied by heavy rains.

So, basically, when the typhoon hits inland, it is pretty much sure to say that a large area would be destroyed or devastated and it is expected to have some casualties.

Considering our country is an archipelago and we are pretty much surrounded with bodies of water; like the majority of areas in our country. These bodies of water could get elevated whenever a typhoon hits and strong winds are extremely strong where homes, buildings, and even natural structures could be destroyed causing landslides and widespread flooding.

A certain percentage of the population will surely be affected whenever a typhoon enters the country’s Area of Responsibility. Here in the Philippines, we are practically prepared and expecting that kind of natural disasters will hit our country anytime. Nevertheless, casualties keep on coming whenever typhoons hit our country.

Comments for Typhoons—A Part Of Life for Virtual Assistants from the Philippines

Aug 15, 2014 They don’t know or they don’t care
by: Lanber Some employers can’t seem to empathize well with this. When a typhoon hits not only do we lose power and Internet connection, we lose water supply too.
Aug 15, 2014 I’d bet most employers don’t know
by: Francis Hey Lanber, thanks for leaving your comment!I personally don’t believe employers consciously choose to ignore the issues typhoons definitively cause for people in the Philippines, namely the many virtual assistants that work there.But I do believe every employer should inform themselves stronger about the backgrounds from their VAs, especially if they work together long term.

If you expect loyalty and the going-beyond-the-expected attitude that makes working with the best VAs so magical – then it’s only fair that an employer has an interest on the conditions of living of the VA in return.

However, I didn’t read much articles online about this topic. Even after hiring many people from all over the world, there is little amount of – prominently – written and promoted materials of “looking behind the scenes”.

That’s why I try to let my assistants “speak their mind” on my website as often as they like to.

By mastering building effective working relationships with your VA that go beyond just calculating your return of interest, you can get even better results as an employer.

To all Virtual Assistants from the Philippines who happen to read this:

Talk about your situation to your employer. Ideally, before an issue comes up (else the employer cannot be sure if the story is true, unfortunately).

And be sure to join in the comments here to tell every reader (future employers or fellow assistants) how the reality with typhoons look like for you, your work life and your living conditions.