The 4-Hour Workweek (17 page)

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Short, sweet, and to the point. Clear writing, and therefore clear commands, come from clear thinking. Think simple.

IN THE NEXT several chapters, the communication skills you develop with our virtual assistant experiment will be applied to a much larger and obscenely profitable playing field: automation. The extent to which you will outsource next makes delegation look like finger painting.

In the world of automation, not all business models are created equal. How do you assemble a business and coordinate all its parts without lifting a finger? How do you automate cash deposits in your bank account while avoiding the most common problems? It begins with understanding the options, the art of dodging information flow, and what we will call “muses.”

The next chapter is a blueprint for the first step: a product.

Go with the Flow

Here is a flowchart of 4HWW from reader Jed Wood, who has used it for faster decision making, more output with less input, and more time with his wife and children.

Q&A: QUESTIONS AND ACTIONS

1. Get an assistant—even if you don’t need one.

Develop the comfort of commanding and not being commanded. Begin with a one-time test project or small repetitive task (daily preferred). I advise using domestic help for language-intensive tasks and using foreign assistants in the early stages to improve the general clarity of your communication. Pick one from each group and get started.

The following sites, split up geographically, are useful resources.

U.S. and Canada ($20/hour+)

http://www.iavoa.com (International Association of Virtual Office Assistants). Global directory that includes the U.S.

http://www.cvac.ca (Canadian Virtual Assistant Connection)

http://www.canadianva.net/files/va-locator.html (Canada)

www.onlinebusinessmanager.com

North America and International ($4/hour+)

www.elance.com (Search “virtual assistants,” “personal assistants,” and “executive assistants.”) The client feedback reviews on Elance enabled me to find my best VA to date, who costs $4/hour. Similar marketplaces with positive reviews include www.guru.com and www.rentacoder.com.

India

www.tryasksunday.com ($20–60 per month for 24/7 concierge, free one-week trial). AskSunday is one of the sophisticated new kids on the personal outsourcing block. Their site was nominated the #2 website of the year in 2007 by Time magazine. Just dial a 212 (NYC) area code and get routed to well-spoken assistants in India and the Philippines. I use this service 80% of the time, as most tasks take less than 10 minues to complete. For longer projects, there are teams available for $12/hour.

www.b2kcorp.com ($15/hour+) From Fortune 10 oil companies and Fortune 500 clients to Big 5 accounting firms and U.S. congressmen, Brickwork can handle it all. This is reflected in the costs of this pure suit-and-tie operation—business only. No flowers for auntie.

www.taskseveryday.com ($6.98/hour for a dedicated virtual assistant) Based in Mumbai, available via phone and e-mail from the U.S., UK, and Australia. Must choose between 20 or 40 hours per week and pre-purchase hours.

www.yourmaninindia.com ($6.25/hour+) YMII handles both business and personal tasks and can work with you in real time (there are people on duty 24/7) and complete work while you sleep. English capability and effectiveness vary tremendously across VAs, so interview yours before getting started or assigning important tasks. Important: Following the publication of the first edition of this book, there have been some complaints of lower quality and up to four-week wait lists to become a client.

2. Start small but think big.

Tina Forsyth, an online business manager (higher-level VA) who helps six-figure-income clients achieve seven figures with business model redesigns, makes the following recommendations.

Look at your to-do list—what has been sitting on it the longest?

Each time you are interrupted or change tasks, ask, “Could a VA do this?”

Examine pain points—what causes you the most frustration and boredom?

Here are a few common time-consumers in small businesses with online presences.

Submitting articles to drive traffic to site and build mailing lists

Participating in or moderating discussion forums and message boards

Managing affiliate programs

Creating content for and publishing newsletters and blog postings

Background research components of new marketing initiatives or analysis of current marketing results

Don’t expect miracles from a single VA, but don’t expect too little, either. Let go of the controls a bit. Don’t assign crap tasks that end up consuming rather than saving time. It makes little sense to spend 10–15 minutes sending an e-mail to India to get a price quote on a plane ticket when you could do the same online in 10 minutes and avoid all the subsequent back-and-forth.

Push outside your comfort zone—that is the entire point of the exercise.

It is always possible to reclaim a task for yourself if the VA proves incapable, so test the limits of their capabilities. Remember Brickwork’s suggestion: Don’t limit yourself.

3. Identify your top five time-consuming non-work tasks and five personal tasks you could assign for sheer fun.

4. Keep in sync: scheduling and calendars.

If you decide to have an assistant schedule appointments and add things to your calendar, it will be important to ensure what you both see is updated. There are several options:

BusySync (www.busysync.com) I have two Gmail accounts: one private account for me and one for my assistant, where general e-mail is sent. I use BusySync to synchronize her Google Calendar with iCal (Mac calendar) on my laptop. I have also used SpanningSync (www.spanningsync.com) successfully for the same purpose.

WebEx Office (www.weboffice.com) Share your calendar online while masking personal appointments. Can be synchronized with Outlook, and also offers document sharing and other assistant- or team-friendly features. I suggest you compare this to synchronizing your Outlook with an assistant’s Google Calendar.

COMFORT CHALLENGE

Use the Criticism Sandwich (2 Days and Weekly)

Chances are good that someone—be it a co-worker, boss, customer, or significant other—does something irritating or at a subpar level. Rather than avoid the topic out of fear of confrontation, let’s chocolate-coat it and ask them to fix it. Once per day for two days, and then each Thursday (M-W is too tense and Friday is too relaxed) for the next three weeks, resolve to use what I call the Criticism Sandwich with someone. It’s called the Criticism Sandwich because you first praise the person for something, then deliver the criticism, and then close with topic-shifting praise to exit the sensitive topic. Here’s an example with a superior or boss, with keywords and phrases in italics.

You: Hi, Mara. Do you have a second?

Mara: Sure. What’s up?

You: First, I wanted to thank you for helping me with the Meelie Worm account [or whatever]. I really appreciate you showing me how to handle that. You’re really good at fixing the technical issues.

Mara: No problem.

You: Here’s the thing.16 There is a lot of work coming down on everyone, and I’m feeling17 a bit overwhelmed. Normally, priorities are really clear to me18 but I’ve been having trouble recently figuring out which tasks are highest on the list. Could you help me by pointing out the most important items when a handful need to be done? I’m sure it’s just me,19 but I’d really appreciate it, and I think it would help.

Mara: Uhh … I’ll see what I can do.

You: That means a lot to me. Thanks. Before I forget,20 last week’s presentation was excellent.

Mara: Did you think so? Blah, blah, blah …

LIFESTYLE DESIGN IN ACTION

  THE BEST TIMES TO SEND E-MAIL

You’ve suggested people check e-mail only a few times a day. Here’s a twist: I reply to e-mails when it’s convenient, but I time it to arrive when it’s also convenient for me. In Outlook you can delay e-mail delivery to any time of day. For example, when I return e-mails at 3 p.m., I don’t want my staff instantly zinging me responses or clarifying questions. (This also prevents e-mail chats.) So I hit send, but it’s delayed to arrive later in the evening or at 8 A.M. when my employees arrive the next day. This is how e-mail was meant to be! It’s mail, not a chat service.

—JIM LARRANAGA

14. To leverage global pricing and currency differences for profit or lifestyle purposes.

15. Information technology.

16. Don’t call it a problem if you can avoid it.

17. No one can argue with your feelings, so use this to avoid a debate about external circumstances.

18. Notice how I take “you” out of the sentence to avoid finger-pointing, even though it’s implicit. “Normally, you make priorities clear” sounds like a backhanded insult. If this is a significant other, you can skip this formality, but never use “you always do X,” which is just a fight starter.

19. Take a little bit of the heat off with this. The point has already been made.

20. “Before I forget” is a great segue to the closing compliment, which is also a topic shifter and gets you off the sensitive topic without awkwardness.

FINDING THE MUSE

Just set it and forget it!

—RON POPEIL, founder of RONCO; responsible for more than $1 billion in sales of rotisserie chicken roasters

As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

The Renaissance Minimalist

Douglas Price was waking up to another beautiful summer morning in his Brooklyn brownstone. First things first: coffee. The jet lag was minor, considering he had just returned from a two-week jaunt through the islands of Croatia. It was just one of six countries he had visited in the last 12 months. Japan was next on the agenda.

Buzzing with a smile and his coffee mug in hand, he ambled over to his Mac to check on personal e-mail first. There were 32 messages and all brought good news.

One of his friends and business partners, also a cofounder of Limewire, had an update: Last Bamboo, their start-up poised to reinvent peer-to-peer technology, was rounding the final corners of development. It could be their billion-dollar baby, but Doug was letting the engineers run wild first.

Samson Projects, one of the hottest contemporary art galleries in Boston, had compliments for Doug’s latest work and requests for expanded involvement with new exhibits as their sound curator.

The last e-mail in his inbox was a fan letter addressed to “Demon Doc” and praise for his latest instrumental hip-hop album, onliness VI.O.I. Doug had released his album as what he termed “open source music”—anyone could download the album for free and use sounds from any track in his or her own compositions.

He smiled again, polished off his dark roast, and opened a window to deal with business e-mail next. It would take much less time. In fact, less than 30 minutes for the day and 2 hours for the week.

How much things change.

Two years earlier, in June of 2004, I was in Doug’s apartment checking e-mail for what I hoped would be the last time for a long time. I was headed to JFK Airport in New York in a matter of hours and was preparing for an indefinite quest around the world. Doug looked on with amusement. He had similar plans for himself and was finally extricating himself from a venture-funded Internet startup that had once been a cover story and his passion but was now just a job. The euphoria of the dot-com era was long dead, along with most chances for a sale or an IPO.

He bid me farewell and made a decision as the taxi pulled from the curb—enough of the complicated stuff. It was time to return to basics.

Prosoundeffects.com, launched in January of 2005 after one week of sales testing on eBay, was designed to do one thing: give Doug lots of cash with minimal time investment.

This brings us back to his business inbox in 2006.

There are 10 orders for sound libraries, CDs that film producers, musicians, video game designers, and other audio professionals use to add hard-to-find sounds—whether the purr of a lemur or an exotic instrument—to their own creations. These are Doug’s products, but he doesn’t own them, as that would require physical inventory and upfront cash. His business model is more elegant than that. Here is just one revenue stream:

1. A prospective customer sees his Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising on Google or other search engines and clicks through to his site, www.prosoundeffects.com.

2. The prospect orders a product for $325 (the average purchase price, though prices range from $29–7,500) on a Yahoo shopping cart, and a PDF with all their billing and shipping information is automatically e-mailed to Doug.

3. Three times a week, Doug presses a single button in the Yahoo management page to charge all his customers’ credit cards and put cash in his bank account. Then he saves the PDFs as Excel purchase orders and e-mails the purchase orders to the manufacturers of the CD libraries. Those companies mail the products to Doug’s customers—this is called drop-shipping—and Doug pays the manufacturers as little as 45% of the retail price of the products up to 90 days later (net-90 terms).

Let’s look at the mathematical beauty of his system for full effect.

For each $325 order at his cost of 55% off retail, Doug is entitled to $178.75. If we subtract 1% of the full retail price (1% of $325 = $3.25) for the Yahoo Store transaction fee and 2.5% for the credit card processing fee (2.5% of $325 = $8.13), Doug is left with a pretax profit of $167.38 for this one sale.