Tips on virtual assistants

Virtual assistants are great. People in the Philippines work well because the value of the US Dollar is about 3:1; i.e., you pay someone $5 and it's like paying them $15 in the States.

I've used them for emails, phone calls, data entry...

My recommendation is this. Hire a bunch of them to do a small task. Give very specific instructions. Pay everyone who completes the job. Fire anyone who is a PITA; keep anyone who makes your life easier.

My wife is actually a VA and is starting her own private offering that offers far better pricing than some of the others out there that are US based. Feel free to reach out to her, she is always looking to bring in new clients. I would obviously highly recommend.
https://vgvirtualassistants.com/

I've hired VAs for one-off tasks, but I'm inconsistent about it.

I've hired for:

• Filling out a bunch of rebate request forms.
  • Cost: $4.63 for 40 mins
  • Did this when I built a PC, I had like 4-5 components with mail-in rebates so I hired a VA in the Phillipines to fill out all the PDFs. Not really worth the hassle because I didn't take into account that I still had to print everything out and address the envelopes, so I didn't really save much time, considering the time of hiring and communicating with the VA.
• Planning a vacation to Yellowstone Park
  • Cost: $118.83 for 7 hours, 40 mins
  • This one worked out really well. I knew I wanted to do a guided backpacking trip and spend a few nights at campsites with friends, so I just asked her to look for options for that and gave her dates. Cost was $118.83 for 8 hours of work, but I don't think I could have done it faster myself and I'd much rather pay her to do that research.
• Gathering price quotes for a personal chef in NYC
  • Cost: $140.00 for 7 hours
  • This one was okay. I messed up and meant to cap the time at 5 hours because I didn't need 7 hours of research into this. She also I think tried to go "above and beyond" by researching meal delivery services as well, but this wasn't what I asked for and it was silly to pay for her time researching this. But I was happy to pay the $140 to not have to go around calling and emailing different chefs myself. My friends made fun of me for essentially outsourcing someone to do my outsourcing.

Tips

• Be very specific about what you want them to do. Especially when they're first starting out with you and especially if there's a language barrier.
  • If you can, give them a template for their output. Like if they're researching something, give them a Google Doc or spreadsheet with the structure you want them to populate.
  • Be clear about what's out of scope. I've had VAs try to be helpful by researching "alternatives" to what I ask for, but if I'm hiring for research on one thing, I'm generally not interested in alternatives.
• If it's a large task, have them do a very small amount first and report back to you. You want to protect against them spending 15 hours in the complete wrong direction.
• Consider the cost of your time
  • For any job on a freelancer site, you'll find people willing to do it for like $4/hr. Take into account ratings and read past reviews. If they're super cheap but you have to keep correcting their mistakes, you defeat the purpose of outsourcing to a VA. Similarly, think about how their language ability will affect their ability to do the job and how much it will slow communication with you.

Bonus Tips

My friend Jonathan Wegener (former CEO of Timehop) relies really heavily on his VA and wrote an entertaining and informative fb post about it last year:

https://www.facebook.com/jwegener/posts/10102230899790732