Offshoring – A Cautionary Tale

I keep telling everyone how I’ve been outsourcing a lot of my work to offshore workers.  I usually paint a pretty rosy picture, but it has its ugly side.  This week I managed to learn something from it.

As you know if you’ve been following my blog, I’ve had some issues with my offshore development team.  I won’t go into those details again, except to say that it gets better for a while, and then gets worse for a while.  The fact is I could not have gotten the work done for the price I paid any other way.  The ups and downs come with the territory.

Working with non-technical VAs is a little different, and usually not as volatile.  One of my VAs was this awesome guy I hired last October.  Oddly enough he was from India and not the Philippines… I wonder if that was part of the problem…

He was so cheap I almost couldn’t believe my luck when I realized how good he was.  For a long time I had him doing research on clubs, compiling a list of as many clubs as he could find.  After some initial training he was pretty much on auto-pilot for 20 hours a week.

Then I felt that he was starting to lose interest, his work was still good but he wasn’t putting in the hours.  I figured he was bored and I needed some testing done so I put him on that (he had some experience testing).

The first week was great, he did all the regression testing, learned the Bugzilla interface and entered bugs and all seemed fine.  Then I put him on writing test cases.

And he disappeared.

I didn’t even notice.

I was so lulled by his previous competence I just believed he would continue to do what he was supposed to do and didn’t need babysitting.

WRONG.

Rule number 1.  Your offshore VAs always need babysitting.  ALWAYS!

Here’s the story in a nutshell… a week and a half after I put him on test cases, I happened to be on oDesk doing something unrelated, and I noticed his work log was emtpy.  It was halfway through the week and he had not logged any hours.  I looked at the previous week.  0:50 hours.  Huh?

So I shot off an email to him asking what was going on and he got back to me immediately and apologized and said he had personal issues that had nothing to do with work.

I was so mad I fired him on the spot and ended his assignment and gave him a lukewarm rating and UNshared him from all my Google Doc files he was using.

Now I’m a little upset with myself for letting my anger drive such a bad business decision.  It was my fault.  I never should have put him on a critical task.  If he had still been doing internet research on clubs I would have just let it pass and waited for his personal issues to sort themselves out.  Then he’d come back and pick up where he left off at his ultra cheap rate and all would be well again.

Damn.

So to recap the lessons learned…

1. Don’t assign a part-time, low-level, offshore resource to any task you consider critical to your business.
2. Check in with your VAs once a week at minimum.  If they are doing something important, check with them twice a week.  A 10-minute Skype chat works just fine.
3. When a VA disappoints you, don’t do anything until you’ve given yourself 24 hours to cool off and figure out who’s fault it really was.

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My new site looks like it’s funded.

I recently decided to bite the bullet and commission a redesign of Grouvia.  The current design, although it’s nice, is too complicated and is causing problems with implementation.

I hired this awesome offshore contractor to do the design and I got a preliminary screenshot today.  I sent it to a colleague and we were talking about it, and to one of her comments I said, “yeah, it looks so much better, cleaner… like we’re funded.”

She laughed.

I can’t put my finger on what that really means, but I feel like it’s true.  The new design makes Grouvia look like the other Web 2.0 sites that have been professionally designed… and those designs probably costs tens of thousands of dollars.  This is costing me about $350.  Of course I have to implement it myself, but that’s ok.  If I wanted to I could probably get that done for a few hundred bucks also.

[Speaking of cheap labor, I said to my Dad the other day, "these people are my staff."  By this I was referring to the subcontractors I've hired from the Phillipines, India, and now Belarus (where they heck is that anyway?).  I'm addicted to offshore staffing.  Need something done quickly for practically no money?  Hire a Filipino!]

Anyway, I’m totally thrilled with this new design – I can’t wait to get it up on the site.  It just feels right.  It feels… funded.

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Link Building – It’s a messy job but somebody’s gotta do it.

I can’t seem to get through the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Dummies book on my own, so my friend who is an SEO expert agreed to do some barter work for me.

Link building is a key component of any good SEO strategy.  Or so she told me and I had to agree because I didn’t know any better.

Link building is an ongoing effort, she says.  You do it a little bit every week, for several weeks at a time, and then repeat that over and over.  In a nutshell, it requires 2-3 people posting comments, blog entries, forum replies, answers to questions, etc, on high ranking sites a whole bunch of times, all containing links back to your site.

At some point, you will see your site’s PR (page rank) improve enough that your SEO effort takes on a life of its own and you don’t need the manual link building any more (or much).  At least that’s the idea.

So now that I’ve done a little research into how this works, let me tell you something: it is not as simple as it sounds.  Let’s go over some of the finer points of link building:

• First of all, this work is BORING and I certainly can’t spend hours and hours every week doing this.  So I decided to get some cheap VAs (virtual assistants) to help.  I posted a very simple job opening on oDesk and within 2 hours had close to 50 applicants.  Whoa horsey!!!  I shut that faucet off as soon as I could chat the help desk to ask them how.
• My personal ethics will not allow me to use black hat methods.  If you don’t know what that is, look it up on wikipedia.  Trust me, it’s bad.  But what it means is that I have to filter out any candidates who I think might use these techniques, because the last thing I want is for Grouvia’s reputation to be tarnished before we’re even one lap into the race.
• You have to hit all different kinds of sites, from ebay and craigslist to blogs, article comments, review sites, and answer sites.  You have to hit the ones that have high PR, you have to hit them at different times of the day, and you have to hit them from different IP addresses and different devices and browsers.
• Here’s a critical piece:  the things you hit have to be RELEVANT to your subject matter.  You can’t just hit anything — you have to hit stuff that means something to your site and your site’s audience.  For Grouvia I could hit anything group-related.
• Finally, the things you say in these posts have to be relevant and valuable.  You can’t just put a comment on a blog post that says “thanks for the great post, signed soandso at www.grouvia.com”.  That would be spam and I get that all the time on my blog.  I trash them, even if it’s the only comment.  Especially the ones that are written by a non-English speaker.  Please.

My friend (the same one I talked about earlier) does this for a living.  She started doing it with stock sites when she was a day-trader, and according to her it works like a charm.

The whole thing seems really scummy, but everyone does it.  Apparently if you don’t do it your site is destined for Internet purgatory forever because nobody will ever find it.  Either that or you’ll have to pay for search engine advertisements which, when you have no money, is not much of an option.

[I just found this hilarious post called 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity.  Maybe he'll see my link and link back to me.]

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Outsourcing Made Easy?

I recently listened to a podcast episode from Internet Business Mastery.  [Internet Marketing is not my business model, but as a busy entrepreneur I do appreciate all their tips on how to maximize your time so you can get more done with less effort.]

This particular episode  had to do with outsourcing and coincidentally I was just about to start researching how this VA (Virtual Assistant) concept works. So after this podcast I decided it seemed easy enough, so I dug in.

There are many places you can find VAs, many more than the ones I found in my research, but I went with oDesk.com because I found my developers there, am relatively happy with their site, and am familiar with the interface.

There are tens of thousands of VAs on the oDesk site.  I narrowed my search by using keywords for the type of work I was looking for (market research, content writing, statistical analysis, databases, etc.).  I narrowed it down further by selecting only those with “Excellent” English skills (self-assessed), 4 star or above ratings, tests taken, and a rate of $10 per hour or less. The vast majority of these people are young women from the Philippines, but there were a few men, and a smattering from India and the US.

If, like me, you have had visions of paying $2.00 an hour for a top notch assistant, you can forget it.  It doesn’t really happen like that.

Then I carefully read each person’s profile, work history, reviews, and work samples if they had them.  I chose the ones I liked by adding them to a”favorites” list and when I had about a dozen, I wrote up the job description and sent out what oDesk calls an Invitation to Interview.

I got responses from a few right away.  Then the hurricane hit the Philippines and I got nothing for several days.  As they recovered from the storm, I got a few more (with apologies!) and then it pretty much fell off.  Some never got back to me at all.

I found that in general, even the ones who claimed excellent English skills do not have excellent English skills, at least not in writing.  I chose two that I felt had the best combination of relevant work, decent written English, and had good reviews from past customers.

I decided to split the work up between the two of them and gave them each half the hours and half the work.  I had an expectation that one of them would be better than the other, but after two weeks I found the opposite to be true.  (My hiring skills have never been spot-on, so I have learned not to completely trust my instincts in this area.)

I “un-hired” the one I felt was not cutting it, and I’ll keep the other and increase her hours to the full 10 hours per week.  As I discover more and more things to give her I can increase her hours as needed.  I also have two more that I liked, as runner-ups, that I could easily slot into the job if I want to try another VA out.

An interesting thing I’m finding out about using VAs is that you can hire them relatively quickly, test them out for a week or two, and if you’re not happy, replace them.  You still got the work they did, the work is not specialized, so it’s not hard to retrain someone new, and eventually you’ll get someone you love and stick with them.

In addition, there are other, even cheaper, resources available (in the $3/hr range) that can be used to do tasks that require brains but not great English.  Researching and compiling lists of clubs is one area that comes to mind.  That will be the next job I outsource… as soon as I have time.

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