Advice on Hiring Virtual Assistants and Managing Costs

In the U.S. or Canada, the per-hour range is often $25—100. Seems like an obvious choice, right? Bangalore 100%? It’s not. The important metric is cost per completed task, not cost per hour. The biggest challenge with overseas help will be the language barrier, which often quadruples back- and-forth discussion and the ultimate cost. The first time I hired an Indian VA, I made the fundamental mistake of not setting an hour cap for three simple tasks. I checked in later that week and found he had spent 23 hours chasing his tail. He had scheduled one tentative interview for the following week, set at the wrong time! Mind boggling. 23 hours? It ended up costing me, at $10 per hour, $230. The same tasks, assigned later that week to a native English speaker in Canada, were completed in two hours at $25 per hour. $50 for more than four times the results. That said, I later requested another Indian VA from the same firm who was able to duplicate the native speaker results. How do you know which to choose? That’s the beautiful part: You don’t. It’s a matter of testing a few assistants to both sharpen your communication skills and determine who is worth hiring and who is worth firing. Being a results-based boss isn’t as simple as it looks. There are a number of lessons to be learned here. First, per-hour cost is not the ultimate determinant of cost. Look at per-task cost. If you need to spend time restating the task and otherwise managing the VA, determine the time required of you and add this (using your per-hour rate from earlier chapters) to the end sticker price of the task. It can be surprising. As cool as it is to say that you have people working for you in three countries, it’s uncool to spend time babysitting people who are supposed to make your life easier. Second, the proof is in the pudding. It is impossible to predict how well you will work with a given VA without a trial. Luckily, there are things you can do to improve your odds, and one of them is using a VA firm instead of a solo operator. Solo vs. Support Team Let’s suppose you find the perfect VA. He or she is performing all of your noncritical tasks and you’ve decided to take a much-deserved vacation to Thailand. It’s nice to know someone besides you will be manning the wheel and putting out fires for a change. Finally, some relief! Two hours before your flight from Bangkok to Phuket, you receive an e-mail: Your VA is out of commission and will be in the hospital for the next week. Not good. Vacation FUBAR. I don’t like being dependent on one person, and [ don’t recommend it in the least. In the world of high technology, this type of dependency would be referred to as a “single point of failure’ —one fragile item upon which all else depends. In the world of IT,45 the term “redundancy” is used as a selling point for systems that continue to function if there is a malfunction or mechanical failure in any given part. In the context of VAs, redundancy entails having fallback support. I recommend that you hire a VA firm or VAs with backup teams instead of sole operators. Examples abound, of course, of people who have had a single assistant for decades without incident, but I suggest that this is the exception rather than the rule. Better safe than sorry. Besides simple disaster avoidance, a group structure provides a pool of talent that allows you to assign multiple tasks without bothering to find a new person with the qualifications. Brickwork and YMII both exemplify this type of structure and provide a single point of contact, a personal account manager, who then farms out your tasks to the most-capable people in the group and across different shifts. Need graphic design’? Covered. Need database management? Covered. I don’t like calling and coordinating multiple people. I want one-stop shopping and am willing to pay 10% more to have it. I encourage you to be similarly pound-wise and penny-foolish. Team preference doesn’t mean that bigger is better, just that multiple people are better than one person. The best VA I have used to date is an Indian with five backup assistants under him. Three can be more than sufficient, but two is toeing the line. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013881