When Personal Outsourcing Fails Miserably

September 21st, 2009

Personal outsourcing is amidst a stint as the It-girl of productivity. Everywhere you look people are trumpeting the idea of having someone else do your work, often for pennies on the dollar. What’s not to love? Right?

Well, “you get what you pay for” is an immutable law of the Universe, and with personal outsourcing there’s no exception. Whether you pay in dollars or hours, you pay nevertheless. Thinking I had been enlightened to a loophole in the law, I tried and tried again to make a relationship with an assistant work. This article will outline some of the laughably bad experiences, identify what went wrong, and look at what actually works.

Personal outsourcing in a nutshell: There are many tasks in life that you don’t have to do. Someone else may be equally qualified to pay bills for you, process spreadsheets, send thank you cards, et cetera. The idea with personal outsourcing is to release those tasks to others. This way you can do the things only you are qualified for — which may or may not include sitting on a recliner eating sliced peaches from the can. The lure of painlessly delegating chores has been multiplied by the siren song of cost effectiveness; the story goes that leveraging strong dollars to weaker rupees will pay for a hyperqualified assistant at superaffordable rates. Send someone your work by email and he/she will be your own “Virtual Assistant” (VA) from abroad. Exciting!

This all sounded too good to be true. I needed to experiment with personal outsourcing myself.

My Personal Outsourcing Experience

In chronological order, spanning one year. Names omitted.

1. Needed some local help running errands and doing administrative tasks (mostly simple research online). Posted a request on criagslist.
2. Received dozens of responses, all very eager.
3. Chose M., $10/hr: Completely unreliable, too occupied with her art exhibits.
4. Later found T., $15/hr: After the first few tasks (mostly online research), emails took longer and longer to be returned. Eventually I was informed she planned to shut down her business due to health problems.
5. At which point I hired S., $20/hr: Gave up in the middle of her second task (find a contractor), citing the passing of a friend.
6. Researched Virtual Assistants and their incredible prices and signed up for the much-trumpeted leading VA provider Get Friday ($10/mo + $15/hr), even though their prices were really no lower than domestic VAs’.
7. After several research tasks being completed haphazardly, my frustration culminated in this experience:
   

   I asked P., my assistant, to the do the following task for me:

   Hello P.,
Can you take half an hour to an hour to find some places around where I live, or in the city of Toronto, who have summer clothes in stock right now. I need some shorts and swim trunks for a vacation I’m going on. Please find me at least 3 places nearby with a good selection.
Thanks!

   It was winter. After three days and a reminder email, I received this exact Word document in an email. To summarize and comment on P.’s findings:

   1. The Toronto Star - Canada’s largest national newspaper. W… T… F?
   2. The Toronto Blue Jays Shop - A sports apparel store located in the Toronto Blue Jays’ baseball stadium. Perhaps they have liberally priced Blue Jays branded shorts in winter. There’s not a lot of baseball being played in Canadian Decembers, so I wasn’t counting on it.
   3. A Kijiji posting for used summer clothes for babies. A mere two hour car ride away.

8. Seeing as how I probably wouldn’t fit into a one-year-old’s onesie, I cancelled my account with Get Friday. I could have raised a fuss but I was just too frustrated.
9. Decided to find someone to only run errands, nothing administrative.
10. Found R., $20/hr, on craigslist: she did a good job, but the cost effectiveness of the experiment had all but disappeared. For example, rather than paying her to get my groceries, I realized it was cheaper to use a grocery delivery service that was dedicated to the task.

What Went Wrong

Economics: In order to find reliable people I had to continue to raise my price. At some point the economics of the situation were no longer justifiable and it became more cost effective to ask a friend for a favour, use a specialized service, pay some kid I knew, or just do it myself.

Accountability incentives: Companies hire by referral whenever possible. They know someone is less likely to flake out of a job if their in-law down the hall has her reputation on the line. There’s none of this effect with an assistant you don’t know from Adam.

Generalists are not specialists: Administrators are generalists. They know how to make reports, email people and dial phones. It takes an implausible stroke of luck for them to know specialist-type information, such as where to find a good geothermal heat pump contractor who won’t rip you off. In most cases they’ll just look in the phone book, but you can do that faster than asking someone else to.

What I Learnt

My experiences with personal outsourcing were not all in vain. I learnt some valuable lessons:

Make the incentive personal: When I was a kid a neighbour paid me to clean his car. Disappointingly, it took much, much longer than I had expected — I was probably missing a Deep Space Nine episode or something. Nevertheless, I did a thorough job just to avoid disappointing someone I frequently saw. Take this psychological effect and use it to your advantage. Hire someone you know, even a kid from your block. They’ll do a good job if only to save face.

Forget leveraging currencies: This never made a difference in my experience.

Use specialized services: Say you want to hire someone to do something very specific for you. An example from my own life: prepare a number of frozen meals to save cooking time. Why would I search for, interview, negotiate with, and count on someone to do the job? That’s just shifting work from cooking to being my own HR staff. I was surprised to find how many companies are out there dedicated to some specific task people need done.

The biggest lesson of all:

It’s expensive: In retrospect this seems evident. So either get more earning power to justify paying someone else, or just do the job yourself. Like many cool things in life, services that take work off your plate are tailored to household incomes bourgeois or bigger.

Setting up a mutually rewarding relationship with an assistant is a delicate procedure requiring harmonious priorities. You might find that in some stranger online, but chances are slim. If you’re looking for someone to take a few things off your plate, focus on hiring someone who will be accountable. If they have no reason to do a good job, they probably won’t. Most importantly, remember that you get what you pay for, whether your expense is in dollars paid or hours spent.