Here’s what we learned, which you can use in many ways when looking for a new VA:

1. Know what you need going in. Estimate exactly what you want your VA to do and estimate how long it will take. Knowing what you want them to do will help in picking the right VA for you. Many VA companies (like GetFriday) are best doing relatively simple tasks, like making phone calls, booking appointments, and basic Web research. We found out the hard way that they’re not exactly programmers or sys admins, although GF did have some of those on staff.

   Estimate how long a task will take and then up it by a factor of at least 1.5 (could be 10x depending on the complexity of the task). Fact is you’re good at what you do because you do it all the time and have experience at it. A newbie isn’t going to get it right away.

2. Be prepared to spend a fair amount of time either writing a detailed e-mail (or recording a video) of the task at hand. Be too vague and you will bear the consequences! Don’t fret if you have to send follow-up e-mails.
3. Be firm with them. You are after all paying them for a service; they should get it right. If they’re pushing back on you, push back or fire them.
4. Ensure that their English is good. Interview your VA first. If you don’t wish to do this over the phone or a VoIP service like Skype, exchange a few e-mails with them. [This point could arguably the #1 one in this list.]
5. Speaking of English, India isn’t the only place you can look for help. Luckily for us Yanks, English is a growing language and everyone wants to know what crazy stuff we’re writing about the Internet and saying in YouTube videos. So that means you can easily look for help in places like Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Philippines.
6. Don’t overlook homegrown or VAs in other Western countries like Canada and the UK. The economy being what it is, not to mention more people wanting to work from home on their computers means there are lots of opportunities for folks who wish to get a VA.

That’s it. Please add your own thoughts if you’ve had experience with a VA. While it wasn’t perfect, we learned a great deal and have used other VAs since because in the end a going concern can’t function without some sort of help, and a VA is a great way to get that help without the cost, overhead and commitment of a full-time employee.

While my padna may have a different take, I currently only have a lukewarm feeling with our first 20 hours. We’ve assigned four tasks including finding sites to locate gadget writers for Gizmos for Geeks, transcribe some audio recordings from our Livescribe sessions at CES, create a spreadsheet of the top 10 web mail providers and determine their antivirus/antispam/antiphishing capabilities and information on cloud-based web hosting companies including if they really are cloud-based web hosters and pricing.

The first task yielded some time spent to come back with sites like guru.com where you put out a bid and wait for writers to respond. I had hoped for something more creative, but the first part of the task was completed according to what we had stated. We then assigned the second part of the task which includes contacting writers that respond. The verdict is still out on that but I think the work deserves a ‘C’ so far.

The second task of transcription of audio sessions actually surpassed my expectations. While I haven’t read through the entire transcriptions yet, our VA did a fairly good job of transcription which definitely provides some value to my padna and I and Get Friday deserves a solid ‘B’.

The third tasks receives a grade of a ‘C’. While I had hoped the information about antivirus and antispam would be included in the spreadsheet provided, the links to get the information were provided. If my calculations are correct, this spreadsheet took 340 minutes or about $57. I probably could have gathered the same information and inserted it into a spreadsheet in about 30 minutes, so the ROI in near even on this one.

Finally, the VA failed miserably on looking for cloud-based web hosting companies and will pick up again on that task next month.

Overall, I was actually surprised by the information gathered for $200, but the verdict is still out. The most difficult aspect of working with a VA is spelling out the tasking very explicitly. My padna has handled this aspect of the relationship so far and I feel he has done an excellent job of spelling out our requirements. I am not sure what happened with the final request, but stay tuned for our second month.

I decided to take the design and creation of themes for these sites as an exercise in outsourcing.

Basically, there are a few ways to find outsourcing staff. First, you could run a google search and pick a couple outsourcing companies and “interview” them. The next approach is to rely on feedback from friends and partners that required your same services. Finally, you can go with a site like Rent A Coder, Elance or Guru that help match professionals looking for work and employers.

The first assignment was to create the themes for Gizmos for Babies and Gizmos for Kids. I elected to use the second approach which was to use feedback from friends and partners that required the same services. As it turned out, Real Tech News had just redesigned and had their new theme developed for them so I used their developer.

Here’s where I learned my first and second lesson. I provided the developer a couple of sites that I would like the GfB and GfK to emulate as well as a basic color scheme. I then let the developer go off and do the work as I’m not and never had been a micro-manager in the “real world”. A week went by with no update so I pinged the developer. I usually had to ping the developer two times before I could elicit a response. This went on for weeks with excuse after excuse after he had promised the stars in one to two weeks. After the fifth week we parted ways. Frustrated with the amount of time I wasted, I ended up designing and developing the themes which are adaptations of other themes available on the Internet.

I mentioned there were two lessons learned… well, the first lesson is to be as specific as possible when outsourcing. The second lesson is to maintain communication on a daily basis through email and through regular reports from the outsourced staff. I believe this second lesson can be relaxed once you’ve gotten to know your outsourced staff, but I haven’t been able to achieve that yet!

The second attempt at outsourcing was recently with the Gizmos for Cooks site. This time I opted to use the third option for outsourcing. Since I was experimenting I took notes and tried each of the three services: Rent A Coder, Elance and Guru. I posted the exact same description which detailed plugins to be used, version of the blogging software, where columns need to be, what the logo should look like, where the ads (with sizes) would be places, etc…. You get the idea. I spent over an hour crafting the description to use on the sites.

Next I created a new project or bid. During this process I discovered that Guru had really strict rules on how to post a project and that I could not request mockups. Also, the project budget is restricted to ranges ($250-$500 for instance). Since I wanted to spend $200-$300 for a theme this was disappointing. Elance had a similar restriction and I could only set a budget of $500 or less. Finally, Rent a Coder had several bonuses the other sites did not have including forcing a bidder to put up an Expert Guarantee that would be lost if they could not finish the work. Also, you could set the exact days you wanted the bidding to remain open as well as setting the budget to any dollar amount.

After another hour plus I had finally submitted the project for bid. I received the following bids:

Guru:
3 bids
$470 from New Zealand
$500 from NY, USA
$480 from CA, USA

Elance:
3 bids
$900 from Romania
$250 from US
$400 from NM, US

Rentacoder:
3 bids
No bid – Azerbaijan
No bid – India
$300 – Peru

I decided to go with the $300 bid on Rent a Coder from Peru. While the US bid at $250 was tempting, my cat could design better themes than what was in his portfolio. The developer from Peru had nice but mostly unoriginal themes, but with my description I figured the theme would turn out nicely. Before accepting his bid I contacted the developer to verify that he understood the project and that he could complete it on time. The bidding process took another couple of hours bringing my outsourcing experiment up to five hours of work… that’s about how long it takes me to create a theme!

Unfortunately I learned another lesson from the Peruvian… don’t believe any excuses and do not give an outsourced employee a second chance if he/she has not proven themselves yet. Basically his promise of providing the theme within four days (which was less than I had asked for) did not come true. He refused to answer his communication and missed new deadline after new deadline. Having to follow the rules of Rent a Coder or forfeit my escrowed money, I had to keep him longer than I normally would. After a brief mediation that I easily won I reclaimed my money after working on outsourcing one theme for 10 hours. Frustrated with the amount of time I wasted, I ended up designing and developing the theme which is an adaptation of another theme available on the Internet (sound familiar?).

Perhaps my next experiment will be an outsourced company that I discover through a Google search but for now, outsourcing has been a waste of my time! Build it and automate it seems to be the way to go, but automating the creation of theme building is an impossible task.