D
Digital Investments
- Original Poster
- #1
About 18 months ago I decided I wanted to expand my website building operations by building an offshore team of VA's.
At the time I was building anywhere between 2-4 niche websites a month, which I would then use to promote relevant offers once these sites had traffic. I had been outsourcing for a long time and had never had any major issues.
I had the budget and done the figures. I wanted the team to be based in the Philippines and approached several outsourcing companies to test their responsiveness and communication skills.
I ended up going with a company that came strongly recommended from a friend and mentor who had a similar business model to my own, and who was using the same company to run his business (he was building several sites a month).
The team consisted of 2x full time writers and 2x full time back linkers who would take away the majority of my workload and free my time. Well at least that was the plan. All I had to do was train them, set them in the right direction and manage them.
Easy right?
No. The whole thing turned into a disaster.
Before I knew it 3 months had gone, I'd blown nearly £4000 and had nothing noteworthy to show of it.
It was a two-sided coin.
One one side I understood that these VA's weren't going to be fully functional on day 1. I had no past relationship with them and we had to get to know each other. They needed time to understand my business model, how things worked and the quality I expected.
On the otherside how much time do you invest before it becomes a loss making operation? How do you know when to pull the plug?
I gave myself 3 months to get things going. I changed a couple of VA's when I realised they weren't capable of delivering to the standard I desired, but in the end the whole project collapsed.
Don't get me wrong, I wasn't some newbie throwing money at the whole VA 'buzz' thing; I'd been outsourcing projects offshore to India and the Philippines for years. I understood how to build relationships with offshore VA's and how to get the most out of them. I had a mini-plan for the project with its own cash flow forecast and I knew exactly what this ioeration should be generating in 6, 12 and 18 months' time. I had operation manuals and daily report templates. Yet I still managed to cock it up.
What Went Wrong?
I made some small and painfully obvious mistakes that I wanted to share with anyone considering building a virtual team within their business. The failure of this project is by no means limited to these mistakes, but these are the things that stand out most in my mind.
1. There is a BIG difference between using VA's for individual projects and building a virtual team for your company.
When you use VA's for individual projects you're typically dealing with them on a 1-on-1 basis; it's you and them. With a team of VA's they will almost certainly be communicating between each other and directly with you and your business. One of the reasons I chose to use an outsourcing company (as opposed to independant VA's) was that I could have all my employees working in and from the same environment, making the chances of this virtual business unit succeeding much more likely. However, I severley underestimated the complexity of this interdependent relationship and the amount of time I needed to invest to get it working. First I had to get the right employees on board, then I had to get them working and interwoven together. This was a much bigger task than I planned/budgeted for and was by far my biggest mistake.
2. I didn't have a suitable framework to manage these VA's as a unit.
The keyword here is team. I created clear operation manuals for each individual VA, each of which had step-by-step instructions on exactly what to do and how. Every VA had a report to fill out and send along with their completed work at the end of each day. However, it never occurred to me to create a suitable framework to manage the team as a whole. I had no way of easily comparing the work quality from all the VA's at once, and had no way to effectively track and compare daily/weekly reports between them. If I had this framework I would have seen very early on who was good and who needed to be replaced. Instead I got sucked into the work and training of each VA seperately and trying to get them to work together as a team. It wasn't until I pulled back that I realised that no amount of training was going to produce the results I wanted with certain VA's, so I had to replace them and start from scratch, costing me time and money.
3. I started way to big
You may be thinking that starting with 4 VA's is an obvious recipe for disaster, but I was fairly seasoned at taking on several VA's all at once for multiple projects (well at least I thought I was). Even so, this was way to much to handle. 4x full time VA's at once?! Again, this goes back to my first point that there is a big difference between using VA's for projects and building an internal team. It was kind of like taking on 4 employees in-house all at once, all needing attention and demanding it. Unless you're a large company and you have the resources, you just don't do it.
Would I Build a VA team again?
Absolutely.
This post is by no means a crack at the whole VA concept, or even offshore VA's. Offshore VA's have their obvious faults, but so do onshore VA's. However there is a key difference between using VA's for one-off projects and building an integral virtual business unit. I'm going to have another go at building a VA team and it was the planning process that inspired meto write this post.
What I learnt was that success with virtual teams is all about YOU and the systems you create. You'be got to approach, plan, prepare and invest in them just as you would an in-house employee, if not more so because they're not in your immediate vicinity. It is possible to successfully build a team of virtual employees for your business (even if the team is based offshore) and tehre are many examples to prove it.
I cringe looking back on this failed project, but I learnt some valuable lessons. The mistakes seem obvious, and they are, but sometimes it's the things right in front of us we don't see.
I hope this is of help to anyone interested in or considering integrating VA's into their business.
All the best
Adrian
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At the time I was building anywhere between 2-4 niche websites a month, which I would then use to promote relevant offers once these sites had traffic. I had been outsourcing for a long time and had never had any major issues.
I had the budget and done the figures. I wanted the team to be based in the Philippines and approached several outsourcing companies to test their responsiveness and communication skills.
I ended up going with a company that came strongly recommended from a friend and mentor who had a similar business model to my own, and who was using the same company to run his business (he was building several sites a month).
The team consisted of 2x full time writers and 2x full time back linkers who would take away the majority of my workload and free my time. Well at least that was the plan. All I had to do was train them, set them in the right direction and manage them.
Easy right?
No. The whole thing turned into a disaster.
Before I knew it 3 months had gone, I'd blown nearly £4000 and had nothing noteworthy to show of it.
It was a two-sided coin.
One one side I understood that these VA's weren't going to be fully functional on day 1. I had no past relationship with them and we had to get to know each other. They needed time to understand my business model, how things worked and the quality I expected.
On the otherside how much time do you invest before it becomes a loss making operation? How do you know when to pull the plug?
I gave myself 3 months to get things going. I changed a couple of VA's when I realised they weren't capable of delivering to the standard I desired, but in the end the whole project collapsed.
Don't get me wrong, I wasn't some newbie throwing money at the whole VA 'buzz' thing; I'd been outsourcing projects offshore to India and the Philippines for years. I understood how to build relationships with offshore VA's and how to get the most out of them. I had a mini-plan for the project with its own cash flow forecast and I knew exactly what this ioeration should be generating in 6, 12 and 18 months' time. I had operation manuals and daily report templates. Yet I still managed to cock it up.
What Went Wrong?
I made some small and painfully obvious mistakes that I wanted to share with anyone considering building a virtual team within their business. The failure of this project is by no means limited to these mistakes, but these are the things that stand out most in my mind.
1. There is a BIG difference between using VA's for individual projects and building a virtual team for your company.
When you use VA's for individual projects you're typically dealing with them on a 1-on-1 basis; it's you and them. With a team of VA's they will almost certainly be communicating between each other and directly with you and your business. One of the reasons I chose to use an outsourcing company (as opposed to independant VA's) was that I could have all my employees working in and from the same environment, making the chances of this virtual business unit succeeding much more likely. However, I severley underestimated the complexity of this interdependent relationship and the amount of time I needed to invest to get it working. First I had to get the right employees on board, then I had to get them working and interwoven together. This was a much bigger task than I planned/budgeted for and was by far my biggest mistake.
2. I didn't have a suitable framework to manage these VA's as a unit.
The keyword here is team. I created clear operation manuals for each individual VA, each of which had step-by-step instructions on exactly what to do and how. Every VA had a report to fill out and send along with their completed work at the end of each day. However, it never occurred to me to create a suitable framework to manage the team as a whole. I had no way of easily comparing the work quality from all the VA's at once, and had no way to effectively track and compare daily/weekly reports between them. If I had this framework I would have seen very early on who was good and who needed to be replaced. Instead I got sucked into the work and training of each VA seperately and trying to get them to work together as a team. It wasn't until I pulled back that I realised that no amount of training was going to produce the results I wanted with certain VA's, so I had to replace them and start from scratch, costing me time and money.
3. I started way to big
You may be thinking that starting with 4 VA's is an obvious recipe for disaster, but I was fairly seasoned at taking on several VA's all at once for multiple projects (well at least I thought I was). Even so, this was way to much to handle. 4x full time VA's at once?! Again, this goes back to my first point that there is a big difference between using VA's for projects and building an internal team. It was kind of like taking on 4 employees in-house all at once, all needing attention and demanding it. Unless you're a large company and you have the resources, you just don't do it.
Would I Build a VA team again?
Absolutely.
This post is by no means a crack at the whole VA concept, or even offshore VA's. Offshore VA's have their obvious faults, but so do onshore VA's. However there is a key difference between using VA's for one-off projects and building an integral virtual business unit. I'm going to have another go at building a VA team and it was the planning process that inspired meto write this post.
What I learnt was that success with virtual teams is all about YOU and the systems you create. You'be got to approach, plan, prepare and invest in them just as you would an in-house employee, if not more so because they're not in your immediate vicinity. It is possible to successfully build a team of virtual employees for your business (even if the team is based offshore) and tehre are many examples to prove it.
I cringe looking back on this failed project, but I learnt some valuable lessons. The mistakes seem obvious, and they are, but sometimes it's the things right in front of us we don't see.
I hope this is of help to anyone interested in or considering integrating VA's into their business.
All the best
Adrian
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