So do I!

Unless you’ve been living on a beach in Costa Rica and only checking your email once a decade, by now you’ve heard all kinds of crazy things about The 4-Hour Workweek. Author Tim Ferris claims to learn languages in 3 months, employ 25 Virtual Assistants all over the world, and to have doubled his company’s profits while cutting his working hours from 70 to 4.

I have to admit that I fell victim to the hype and bought the book a couple of months ago. While I expected it to be full of wild exaggerations (it probably is) and tons of crazy ideas that aren’t even appealing to me (having an Indian Virtual Assistant apologize to my significant other for me), I was also completely blown away by the possibilities the book presents.

The 10-Second Book Summary
In a nutshell, Tim advocates developing ways of earning money that aren’t directly dependent on time input. In the world of normal people, this is called passive income. Once you’ve created passive income and have time freedom, you can apply what Tim calls geoarbitrage (taking advantage of currency differences in lower cost of living nations) and spend time moving around the globe enjoying “mini-retirements.”

This all sounds pretty good to me.

It has always been my dream to live on a little island somewhere where it never gets cold. A place where I can write short stories in the morning and nap on the beach in the afternoon – while being fanned by my cabana boy, of course. The 4-Hour Workweek is selling that dream, which probably explains why it’s a runaway best seller.

My Experiences
I don’t realistically expect to be making 100 bazillion dollars by selling information products on the internet (the main business that Tim suggests for a “muse”) and I don’t necessarily want to spend 4 months a year in Cambodia. However, I am interested in getting a little more time freedom with little or no impact on my income. I’ve started to take some baby steps using some of the methods of the book, and I want to share my experiences here.

My Indian VA
Perhaps the most spectacularly over-hyped section of the book talks about using low cost Virtual Assistants from places like Indiana, Romania and the Philippines to handle everything from market research to breaking in a new pair of jeans. Since this is the part of the book that really caught everyone’s attention (and because Elance was offering a $25 off coupon), I thought this would be a good place to start. Because I am an employee and not (yet) a self-employed entrepreneur, I decided to outsource something from my personal life.

I wanted to start with something low key that didn’t require me giving up my bank account or Social Security numbers, yet is time consuming and fairly routine. I decided to outsource the planning of my social life.

I’m the type of person that is usually calling around on Saturday afternoon to find something to do Saturday night, so it would be a nice change of pace to plan ahead a little. What I envisioned is that a VA would search the web for activities in my area and send me a nice spreadsheet with 25-50 choices of live music, art exhibits, festivals, and other fun things that I described. Then, just for kicks, I would have the VA send an email to my friends asking them to vote for their choice of activity. After all, why not have a little fun with the process?

I submitted a project and got about 10 bids in a variety of price ranges from $4 to $15 per hour. Since this experiment was all about outsourcing as cheaply as possible while still getting acceptable results, I selected an Indian firm that was offering $4 per hour and had gotten quite a bit of good feedback. I sent what I thought a detailed but straightforward explanation of what I was looking for including dates, towns, keywords, types of activities, and even a couple of websites to check. After I hit “Send” I sat back and waited for one of those beautiful Excel spreadsheets everyone talks about.

The next morning I logged into Elance and downloaded what I thought would be my completed research document.

That’s when I realized this isn’t going to be as easy as Tim Ferris made it sound.

I don’t know what went wrong, but I got back a cut-and-pasted Word document for things I didn’t want to do on days that I hadn’t listed in my instructions. Ugh.

Time to re-evaluate how I was communicating. I did some searching around on the 4-Hour Workweek message boards (note: you need a password from the book to access this board) and found a template for communicating with a VA. In my next attempt, I tried to stick to very simple, unambiguous words. I re-stated that I was only interested in a certain date. I suggested that the VA start with Google Local for a certain list of towns and search for restaurants, niteclubs, and bars, and look at the websites for each of those businesses to check their calendar for events. I even asked the VA to re-state my instructions to make sure she understood before beginning work. I thought I was doing so well!

The next morning I got back a list of restaurants, bars, clubs, and even a few strip clubs. No events, no dates, no bands, nothing. I still have 8 hours of work on this damn contract and I’m fed up already!

To Be Continued…
This post is already longer than I intended, so tomorrow I’ll share my experiences of outsourcing closer to home. I would love to hear from anyone that has had success using overseas VAs. As you can probably tell, I need all the help I can get on building my VA communication skills!

Update: Check out part 2 here! 

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