potency, so he demanded that fresh oranges be sliced and juiced in front of him.
2. When Hughes was partaking of the nightlife in Las Vegas, his aides were charged with approaching any girls he took a liking to. If a girl was invited to join the Hughes table and agreed, an aide would pull out a waiver and agreement for her to sign.
3. Hughes had a barber on call 24/7 but had his hair and nails trimmed about once a year.
4. In his hotel-bound years, Hughes was rumored to have instructed assistants to place a single cheeseburger in a specific tree outside his penthouse room at a 4:00 P.M. each day, whether he was there or not.
Such a world of possibilities! Just as the Model-T brought transportation to the masses, virtual assistants bring eccentric billionaire behavior within reach of each man, woman, and child. Now, that’s progress.
Without further ado, let me pass the mic. Note that YMII performs both personal and business tasks, whereas Brickwork focuses solely on business projects. Let’s start with the important but dull stuff and move quickly from the sublime to the ridiculous. To give a true taste of what to expect, I have not corrected non-native- sounding English.
Venky: Don’t limit yourself. Just ask us if something is possible. We’ve arranged parties, organized caterers, researched summer courses, cleaned up accounting books, created 3D drafts based on blueprints. Just ask us. We could find the closest kid-friendly restaurant to your house for your son’s birthday, finding out costs and organizing the birthday party. This frees up your time to work or hang out with your son.
What can we not do? We can’t do anything that would require our physical presence. But you would be surprised as to how small a set of tasks that is in this day and age.
Here are the most common tasks we handle:
scheduling interviews and meetings web-research following up on appointments, errands, and tasks online purchases creation of legal documents website maintenance (web design, publishing, uploading files) that doesn’t require a professional designer monitoring, editing, and publishing comments for online discussions posting job vacancies on the web document creation proofreading and editing documents for spelling and formatting online research for updating blogs updating the database for Customer Relationship Management Software managing recruitment processes updating invoices and receiving payments voicemail transcription
Ritika at Brickwork added the following:
market research financial research business plans industry analysis market assessment reports preparing presentations reports and newsletters legal research analytics website development search engine optimization maintaining and updating databases credit scoring managing procurement processes
Venky: We have a forgetful client who has us call him all the time with various reminders. One of our clients on a custom plan has us wake him up every morning. We’ve done the legwork and found people who fell out of contact after Katrina. Found jobs for clients! My favorite so far: One of our clients has a pair of trousers that he really likes that aren’t in production anymore. He’s sending them to Bangalore (from London) to have created exact replicas at a tiny fraction of the price.
Here are a few other YMII custom requests:
Reminding an overzealous client to pay his current parking fines, as well as not speed and collect parking fines.
Apologizing and sending flowers and cards to spouses of clients.
Charting a diet plan, reminding client on it regularly, ordering groceries based on the specific diet plan.
Getting a job for a person who lost his job due to outsourcing a year back. We did the job search, did the cover letters, did the resume tuning, and got the client a job in 30 days.
Fixing a broken windowpane of a house in Geneva, Switzerland.
Collecting homework information from teacher’s voicemail and e-mailing it to the client (parents of the kid).
Research on how to tie a shoelace meant for a kid (client’s son).
Find a parking slot for your car in some other city even before you make the trip.
Ordered garbage bins for home.
Get an authenticated weather forecast and weather report for a particular time in a particular place on a particular day, five years ago. This was to be used as supportive evidence for a lawsuit.
Talking to parents in our client’s stead.
Here’s another real example of personal outsourcing from reader David Cross, who got a personal chef at home for less than $5 per meal. Just thinking of the possibilities is enough to make you start drooling. He explains:
I wanted to find someone to prepare food I love. I trained as a chef but I am often so busy and as I am the only one in the house who really cooks, I often don’t have time to prepare the food that makes me feel the healthiest so I wrote the attached ad and dropped it on Craigslist.
This was a very tight focus—ultraspecific—I had just two applicants in two months—one who was a 2/10 match but the guy we just OK’d was a Hare Krishna follower for many years, lived in India, and his sample menu proved he knew what he’s doing so we just started him.
The food is absolutely awesome. The hourly rate is *extremely reasonable,* he’s a five-minute detour when either of us are in town to collect food and I now have delicious Indian food for less than $5 a meal and it’s as good as anything I’ve ever eaten anywhere.
I’m going to progress to other cuisines now… Thai, Italian, Chinese, etc., and it means when I do have time to cook I’ll enjoy doing it that much more as I am not the only one cooking!
Indian/Asian Vegetarian Cook Needed
Date: 2007–06–07, 12:25PM PDT
Hello.
We are a local, international family who love Indian and Asian vegetarian food. We are looking for a cook experienced in this wonderful cuisine to prepare delicious, fresh, healthy, authentic Indian/Asian vegetarian meals for us.
If you’ve cooked a curry once or twice or need to follow recipes, this position is probably not for you, but if you know Indian vegetarian cooking in depth and can prepare delicious, healthy, fresh, authentic Indian vegetarian food then we’d like to hear from you. This could be an ideal opportunity if you are Indian, Pakistani, Punjabi, etc., and are looking for a great way to apply your experience and love of Indian vegetarian food, cooking and culture. Knowledge of Ayurved and how this relates to food and diet is a plus though not essential.
Please reply with details of your experience and some dishes you could prepare. If we like what you have to offer, we’ll arrange for you to cook a sample meal or two which we will pay you for and then we’ll see what works out for us all.
This is a part-time position. You will be self-employed and responsible for your own taxes, etc. We’ll pay you an hourly rate we will agree with you plus grocery bills for the food you prepare. You can prepare food in your own place and we can arrange to collect it from you, possibly for us to freeze for later eating. We will work with you to come up with menus and schedules that work out for you and us.
Thank you for your interest.
Basic Choices: New Delhi or New York?
There are tens of thousands of VAs—how on earth do you find the right one? The resources at the end of this chapter will show you where to look, but it is overwhelming and confusing unless you have a few criteria determined in advance.
