VA and Elance

[final_id]

For me the usual cultural divide, when dealing with "new" business countries and cultures, is the following:

Originally Posted by what I'm familiar with

do what you said for the price you said or else I'm unhappy

versus

Originally Posted by what others might be familiar with

do some, all, or none, sometime or somehow, and maybe up the price and maybe not, in order to "feel out" our ongoing relationship with the person, and apply emotional assuagement techniques AFTER failure in order to deal with some kind of familial relationship in which we are all buddies and cut each other slack all the time

Heh.

I think the best way to deal with these things is to prevent them from ever happening. A simple, direct statement, at the top, that is often repeated, which says essentially the first quote, is not inappropriate:

Originally Posted by letter to VA

Dear Sir: We now have an agreement that the deadline is Wednesday. That means I cannot accept work which arrives after Wednesday, nor can I pay for it. Should you wish to change that date, you must inform me before it arrives and you must accept a reduction in payment. In addition, we now have an agreement that the work to be performed will be the following specifics ...

I don't mind doing that quite regularly until a relationship is established. Dealing with assistants (real or virtual) is all about being clear with expectations and with the work-to-reward ratio. If the reader of that message is uncomfortable with the "tone" or the "implication" that they're somehow not already capable and would need to be told this stuff, then perhaps that reader isn't the right person to hire in the first place.

Just my suggestions. I have supervised a LOT of "less than capable" people in the real world (often just college kids, or people who had a good heart but a lack of "business culture" experience). You learn early on to lose your own need to "seem nice." People can like you or hate you, but they can never misunderstand you, so says Tim. He says it about products, but it applies equally well to supervision.

[kevkos]

I tried one of the $2/hour ones from elance and they were terrible!
They didn't understand much of anything I told them to do, and they did a couple of projects completely wrong. Their english appeared to be good over email but some things must have been getting lost in translation.

I'm instead using a tech support team (in India) now that charges $15/hr and a VA (in Canada) for my customer service issues that charges $18/hr.

[cephus6]

Originally Posted by ardor

customersolutionz.biz

They got my phone connection things working
and also got my resume done, they are charging me 5$/hr
the first invoice they sent me was for 13 hours of work

I disagreed made my point valid and
they sent me a new invoice of 6 hours.

Even people in inidina are going to try and overcharge you if you don't haggle.

Today, I submitted some Internet Research work, that would make me look good for the company i work for, I told them to take 3 hours on it, so 15$ for collecting the infomation that I can build a kick ass report and hopefully argue a new pay raise.

I was looking at this company on the internet, could you give us an update on how they are working out for you?

[oizzio]

Here is an example of the format I am using when assigning projects to VA's.

This template has been in use for 6 months and has seen great success over a number of different VA's I have worked with.

Feel free to pick it apart or give it praise. Ha. Thanks.

===================================

Dear ____VA NAME_____,

Thank you.

I would like to start with the following task.

After you read the task, please confirm by email ([YOUR_EMAIL]) that you understand everything.

Task 1

I need to get contact information of Top Business blogger’s.

Please visit this web page: http://fake-url-for-info-you-want.com

On this page, there is a list of 50 business blogs. A title with a URL and a description is provided. Please make a list in the excel file I provided (top-business-bloggers.xls) using the title and description.

After you have the list of 50 blogs in the excel file….then….visit each blog and record the Website name, URL, Contact Name, Email Address, Phone Number, and Description into the excel file.

The most important info we need is the Contact Name, URL, and Email address. If there is no email address provided, log the URL of the ‘contact us’ page.

For each blog, visit http://alexa.com/ and enter the URL of the blog into the search box at the top of the page, then hit the search button. Results will be returned and the blog you searched for will probably be at the top of the list. Record the ‘rank’ number in the excel file under the column ‘Alexa Rank.’

Please spend 1 hour on this task. After you have spent one hour, email the Excel file to [YOUR_EMAIL] and I will check your work.

Wait for my response before you continue.

Can you do this? If not, please advise.

Deadline - Since I am in a rush I would like you to get started as soon as possible and have this completed by the end of day on [DUE DATE]

Thank you very much for your fastest reply.

[YOUR_NAME]

[gsimd]

Hi Oizzio,

Thanks for posting your template. It looks good. I will offer a quick suggestion. I've worked with several overseas contractors and have found the key to success is to make sure the words I'm using are simple and have no double meaning. In other words, I avoid using a lot common business language like "get underway" and "bottom line". As far as your template goes here is an example of how to be as clear as possible.

Originally Posted by oizzio

I would like to start with the following task.

By starting with the word "I", you are directing the communication to yourself instead of the VA. Also, the word "would" may be hard to decipher for an intermediate English speaker. "Can you" is safer. Finally, "following" can mean "after", "behind the leader" or "second". So, your opening line could be read a few different ways. Such as:

"I like to begin with the second task" "
"I would like to start the task later".
"I would like to start the task after the leader".

A clearer statement might be: "Can you do this task?"

It can be frustrating at first, but after a while, I've become accustomed to writing like a 5 year old.

Best,
Michael
http://www.familyhack.com

[MariaG]

@gsimd & @oizzio - Thank you for those tips. I just began working on a project w/ a $4 hour VA firm I found through elance. Like others, I am a bit frustrated at this point. The first go-round was just awful. I'm hoping with more precise language I can get the results I want.

[oizzio]

Thanks - gsimd

You have made some very good points. Thank you.

My project descriptions have been tweaked over time and are just about at perfection (I do not receive questions and the tasks are completed perfectly - and on time).

Guru.com has been my place of choice. I'm about to try elance and odesk is next.

Anyone have experience with odesk?

[markus]

I didn't have a good experience with oDesk but that's partly because I didn't define the scope and timeline well enough. I prefer per project pricing with a clearly defined scope rather than per hour - since it takes a lot of work to make sure the hourly work creep doesn't get out of control.

[outofbandii]

Hi all,

I'm interested in the experiences and templates posted above.

I've 2 VA arrangements - one with GetFriday (YMII) and the other with a New Zealand based (native English speaker) VA. The Indian VA costs ~$11 p/h, the NZ VA ~$28.

So far the NZ has outperformed the Indian by about 10 to 1 on all tasks. The cheaper per hour cost has in no way resulted in lower cost per task, even on what I thought were simpler tasks. Any tasks that require any kind of thinking were even further apart in quality of work than 10-1.

You guys seem to be spending a lot of effort defining tasks and wording emails. I think that in the short term this definitely does not make financial sense.

What I'm wondering is whether you're putting up with the communication difficulties now because you believe there will be long term benefits in lower costs? Or are you just putting up with it cos it's cheap?

[Dave]

Originally Posted by ardor

I read 10 Assistant postings, cutting what I liked into notepad then I created my own posting.

I wonder if you can provide the template for your project posting?

There's some good examples of how to word emails to the VA, but I'd be interested in seeing the requirements you put forth in finding one in the first place.