One of the books I’m most recently excited about is Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Work Week. I actually caught Tim live at SXSW last February, but I didn’t really get interested in his book until I read a great review and decided to give it a read. I was blown away by it. Like a lot of other people, I really felt like it was speaking directly to me.
One of the areas I found most interesting was his suggestion at hiring someone through India to be a remote personal assistant. This would have made a lot more sense if just about every project I ever did with an offshore development firm went to complete crap. But I decided to give it a try and attempted to hire one of the firms mentioned in his book, Brickwork India. You can read how that went in my review of Brickwork India.
Since that was a dead end, I tried another company he mentioned, Your Man In India, who has a new site just for this, GetFriday.com. Again, the response was slow and when we finally did hear from someone I had to listen to the voice mail a few times to understand what he was saying. I finally caught the words “Ed� and “Get Friday�. So this was clearly not going to work.
With my up coming departure from USWeb, I needed to fill a couple positions quickly. I put an ad up on Craigslist and found someone who fit the bill pretty quick. He was available right away, so I started him part time for his training. This person was handling a very specific task, but I needed someone as an assistant to help me with all my small daily items at NetResults.
While waiting for GetFriday to get back to me, a friend let me know that his wife was looking for a position. Having met his wife and finding her to be very intelligent and friendly, it seemed like a perfect fit. I have a rule about working with friends, but after a quick talk that was worked out and we decided to start, again on a part time basis to get trained and see how things go.
If you do some research on Brickwork India, you’ll see that the average rate they charge for a person right now is $15 per hour. And that rate is supposed to go up because of huge demand. But I was able to get both the above mentioned employees for $15 per hour. Keep in mind, these are experienced, educated Americans with no accents, time differences, or telephone issues. Both people wish to be employed as contractors, and have their own computers and telephones.
I will of course have to offer raises and the occasional bonus to keep them up with the value they have to the company, but like I said, the offshore firms are planning on raising their prices as well soon.
I can’t help but wonder how we go to the point where we pay offshore firms in India more than we pay employees here. I’m sure that these firms would argue that this price point gets you someone highly qualified, and they often tout MBA’s, but are you going to use someone in a foreign country to do anything that would require an MBA? Personally most of what I need in the people I hired was good communication skills, a little better than basic knowledge of the Internet, and competency.
I’ll do a follow up to this post in 30 days and let anyone interested know how this went with my new hires.
Technorati Tags: outsourcing, india, offshore, brickwork india, your man in india, getfriday, tim ferriss, 4-hour work week, usweb, netresults
Provider’s point of view
I am proud to be in this industry and I know how much I have learnt from working with my wonderful clients. It depends entirely on how deeper mutual understanding we have and our commitment towards creating success stories.
Success rate in such engagements is very significant and I can vouch for that. It takes a while before you manage to identify the right company and right people. In non-virtual scenario too, you’ll still struggle to hire a right person at right cost. Right?
I too have done considerable amount of outsourcing in my work. One thing that I noticed.
Europeans and Americans were charging 10 times the amount of money that they were in India. For programming it was usually $100/hr vs $10/hr.
This alone, convinced me to look to India for quite some time.
However, to keep my options open, I would request quotes from US and European programmers too.
The biggest laugh I got was the *consistent* difference of time.
Almost without exception, the Indian firms quoted 10 times MORE hours than the US or European.
Worked out to the same amount of money in the end. No savings for me at all.
However, the Indian firms had considerably more hassle in trying to get things done.
I’ll stick with US and European for now. I’d like to say I’m supporting my own country, but I’m from Canada!
Dave
I have been using Catchfriday.com in the Philippines for outsourcing, and have been impressed with their command of English. I have a virtual personal assistant working for me UK hours and she is very good. I even was given a number of resumes and a choice. I interviewed the applicants and chose Angel, my clients like her because shes professional and humorous.
Altogether they have given me a good service, and price wise are much cheaper than if I had hired a full-time person here.
I just went onto the catchfriday.com website and discovered poor English and grammar. Not a good sign — at the very least they should hire a copy editor. When I tried to send them an email via their form, an error page kept coming up saying that the “verification code” that I was supposed to type in a field was wrong, although I had typed in correctly each time.
Good post!
Why not outsourcing to China!
BPOVIA is much better virtual assistant provider compare to Getfriday.
We compared the Cost, Signup Process, Payment Process, Cancellation of Service, Refund Policy of 2 companies.
Please read the full article here:
http://www.bpovia.com/blog/china-outsourcing/bpovia-vs-getfriday.html