My partner at Felthos Foundry and I finally bit the bullet and hired a Virtual Assistant firm, Get Friday, this past month after reading about Tim Ferriss’ successes with VAs in The 4-Hour Workweek. We opted to try the service for a few months starting with the Basic-20 plan that includes 20 hours for $200 with additional hours at $12/hour. If the VA brings value, we plan to expand to 40 or more hours.

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.