The Virtual Team

If anyone has read Tim Ferriss’s popular book, ”The 4 Hour Work Week”, then they’ve heard about profiting from economic imbalances outsourcing to the east. Tim goes so far as to have virtual assistants in India manage schedules and things for him.

Outsourcing to countries where your money is worth a lot more where they are located is a win/win for you and the worker. They make more money where they live and you pay much less than you would have to in your own country. (If you live in a western country)  Not to mention, people in the east tend to work harder and appreciate more having work. They probably have less of an entitlement attitude.

The bad side of this of course is that there is less work for local workers in your own country. There is a lot of debate about this, understandably, but I have to admit it would have been much harder for me to have gotten my online business going if I had to pay a local salary in Spain. In fact, it would take a long time to make progress and generate enough money to pay social security, tax and wages for employees. So for now my team is completely virtual, I am the only one on salary. Maybe in the future that will change but it’s the best I can do for now.

Here is how my internet virtual team breaks down:

South America

• Small business in Colombia provides part time programming, 1 full time link builder (for Spanish sites), and another helper who attends clients (from ebook sales), affiliates and emails to one of my accounts. He also builds link and does miscellaneous tasks in his free time.
• News writer for one of my sites who resides in Chile. She only develops a few news articles per week.

Spain

• Family relative who inputs data for one Website and manages paid sponsors.

Asia

• Small business in India who manages link building for English sites. I have two full time link builders here.
• Small business in Philippines who manages some English content for one of my sites and also English promo content. Pay is by articles (instead of hours).
• Full time programmer in Indonesia.

Every time I mention ‘small business’ these were people who did everything themselves when we first started working together and started hiring other people to help out as they got more work and clients.

¿How did I find them?

My Colombian friend I met online because he asked me for a free copy of an ebook I translated. Since he was a programmer I told him he could do some work in exchange for the book. He continued to work for me for a while and then started hiring his own programmers and other employees.

I found my Spanish news writer by sending out a message to my mailing list (from that site). It was tough because I got hundreds of responses from interested people and several that were professional. I took my pick and got lucky.

I found my programmer from Indonesia from advertising the job on different sites. Not sure which one he found the ad on (Maybe phpjobs.com). But I got lucky because he does a very good job.

I found my first link builder from India because he was negotiating links on my site for his client. He negotiated his butt off to save his client a few dollars! I was thinking if getting a link builder at the time so I offered him a job. He quit his other job and started working for me.

I am currently having an ebook translated by someone in Argentina who I found through elance.com. We’ll see how that goes, but she could become a new member of the team if it goes well.

The great thing about virtual employees/freelance is that you can all work together from anywhere and you don’t have to meet in the office.  The best thing before choosing anyone is to first test them. Instead of just reviewing resumes, interviewing or whatever a normal company does, send the person a temporary project or two and see how they do. If they do really well and seem highly reliable then hire them.