When a Forbes’ columnist calls, you tend to answer the phone! I was excited to have the opportunity to discuss some of my previous experiences using virtual assistants for this article on the Forbes website. You can still read the full article online, here is an excerpt of it below.
Chris Pund, who runs several Web businesses, including the Dorm Room Biz entrepreneurship site, says he has used services like Elance and oDesk on other occasions, but to recruit a VA he posted the opportunity on his blog and on Twitter and interviewed a few of the people who responded. “I wanted someone who was an entrepreneur, like me, and wasn’t just going to farm out the work I gave her to someone else.”
Over the next year, the woman he hired wound up spending 10 to 20 hours a week assisting him, mostly on research for topics he wanted to blog about. To make the remote relationship work, he had to learn how to package up the work he wanted to hand off. Instead of just saying to research a given topic, he would give “very clear, step-by-step instructions” on the details he was looking to gather. “But it’s a worthwhile trade-off because I can spend 10 minutes writing the directions, vs. the four hours it would take me to do the research.”