Mamtha and Me: My foray into Indian outsourcing.

Ah, the sweet twinge of embarrassment.  Not the kind of embarrassment where you are watching where you step so you walk forehead first into an awning support pole (me, sixth grade), but the kind of embarrassment you feel watching Drew Barrymore in Never Been Kissed, where she flops about the screen awkwardly for 90 minutes, complete with antics and highjinks and the oh-god-when-is-she-going-to-stop-being-such-a-twit?

I posted to a message board for solo attorneys about getting a Virtual Assistant to help with some clerical work, and got a flood of response.  Mostly attorneys saying to hire a law student for $10/hr.  But I got a few of responses from people who were looking to help.  One was a VA who proceeded to explain that if I couldn’t pay her $45/hr, then my business was struggling and I was undervaluing my services.  Nice marketing strategy.  But, otherwise, I got three high quality responses, one of them a law student who was willing to help me for a rate I could live with.

This morning, posted to a random blog that was probably only discovered thanks to Google Alerts, Matt’s Life Musings, the author posted “In Search of a Virtual Assistant.” Matt then details how much trouble he is having finding someone in India to do a good job for $3/hr. He’s gone through three VAs in a month trying this out.   I got that embarassed-for-someone-else feeling when I read his account of this fiasco (wondering, did I sound like that when I questioned $35/hr?).

Now, you might be chuckling because you’re thinking, “Yeah, but what an idiot.  Who thinks you can get good help for $3/hr?”  Well, don’t judge.  Not yet anyway.

A few months ago I was fixing up a directory website and needed someone to go get me a few hundred of a specific kind of link.  I had just heard of this Indian assistant craze so I thought, “Why not?”  For the kind of work I needed done, you didn’t have to have perfect English, and it was pretty darn easy (so I thought).   I advertised on Bangalore Craigslist, detailing the assignment and what I needed done, and the responses quickly POURED in. So much so that I had to take the ad down after 12 hours just to sort through the pile of nonsense I had gotten.

A pile of nonsense indeed. There were so many bizarre, incomprehensible responses, some quoting me rates in Rupees, some trying to get me to cash bank checks and wire money, and only a few that I could even make sense of at all. So I picked someone, let’s call her Mamtha.  Mamtha requested $3 to do what would take me about an hour to do.  The price was “Wow!” and she was eager, so I figured we could give it a shot.

It didn’t go so well.  I wanted something fairly specific.  A list of links, of a certain kind of business, in a certain geographic location.  First, as of the due date Mamtha had suggested, I hadn’t heard anything at all from her. Emailed her.  “You still want to do this?”  She said yes, emphatically, and got to work.  She sent me something like six or seven emails, with links to things I never asked for, in a format that was unusable.  But she was very eager to please.  So I told her what was wrong, and she resubmitted, and it was closer to what I wanted, but still not quite there.

I ended up volunteering to pay her more because I was sure she tried very hard, but the work just wasn’t good enough, so I didn’t hire her to do anything else.  Nor did I sort through the rest of the folder with all those emails of interest.

Matt (Mr. $3/hr), says on his blog, “You can find good help in India for cheap!! I’m searching for it.”  See, I agree with him. I am sure there are some quick, intelligent, educated people over there that will do computer work for $3/hr (or $5, or lawyers who will work for the commonly charged $10-12/hr).  But good f’in luck sorting through the seven hundred emails you will get in a week’s time if you leave an ad up on the Bangalore Craigslist site.

Mamtha used words like “oops” and “for real” when she emailed me.  Sometimes I wondered if she wasn’t some woman in rural America just pretending to be Indian so she could explain why she charges such low rates.  But, ultimately, even with her textbook-correct English, there was a disconnect in me being able to communicate what I wanted and her being able to provide that service.

Fastforward to more recently, when I realize I really do need a little clerical help if I am going to grow my business.  I tried a few different methods of looking around, including cold emails, contacting AssistU, and even Twittering that I need someone to do some bluebooking for an academic article.  And I even put up an ad on Craigslist again.  This time in the red, white, and blue.  (No, not France.)

The quality of responses I got on Craigslist varied hugely.  One woman pleaded with me in her email, explaining that she is due in April.  There was no resume, and the email dropped off mid-sentence.  Maybe she went into labor.  Others stated rates ranging from $10-$45/hr, and the rates charged didn’t seem to have much correlation at all to what the people were capable of doing.  I got an actress who had been on Guiding Light wanting to open my mail, and a Marine Prison Guard who wanted to manage my calendar. The whole thing was overwhelming.

The point in all this is that, sure, they may be some gems who are just savvy enough to do VA work but not savvy enough to charge much, but good luck finding them.  It reminds me of a practitioner who recently confessed that he pays his contract attorney only $20/hr.  I’m thinking about all the cooler, easier work I could do for $20/hr, and the mammoth expense of actually being an attorney (bar exams, continuing education, publishing, paying off all the cops that pull you over while hotboxing), and wondering what that guy is really getting for $20/hr.  Who knows, though, maybe its a lot.  Maybe he got the gem.  (Kidding about the cops, by the way).

So what has all this taught me?

(1) That you get what you DON’T pay for. You might not always get what you DO pay for, but if you are only willing to throw someone $3/hr, then you are going to get, at most, $3/hr worth of services.  Similarly, by hiring a law student to help out, you’re guaranteed that the person won’t be working for $10-12/hr in two years when they’re out of school.

(2) I’m not feeling so threatened by the Indian outsourcing phenomena. So what there are lawyers over there offering legal research and writing for $10-12/hour?  I work with solos mostly, and occasionally small firms.  They don’t have time to be flying to India and interviewing commonwealth lawyers and seeing about their Lexis skills.  They can look at my resume though, see that I was in the top 10 in my class, and assume I’m not an idiot.  They can see that I have some other lawyer clients, and that those people seem pretty happy, so I’m obviously not a crook or a thief.  They can download my writing samples from my website and see I can put a sentence and a thought together.  These are things that are made possible by my being domestic.  (But not like domestic beer.  I would never analogize myself to domestic beer.  Except maybe microbrew.)  My experience with Mamtha reassured me in that way.

(3) It gives me confidence in the rates I charge. Sometimes I feel bad handing a client an estimate, or an invoice, wondering if they’re thinking I’m overpriced, or not worth it.  It’s just a personal problem I have.  But I need to remember that when I’m working, I’m working really smart, and pulling everything I’ve learned together for the benefit of the client.  I have a lot of experience, and I’m quick, and I can understand what someone is saying to me, and how they might like the research and project completed.  Now that I’ve been through the VA-circus, I see that you can’t put a price on just being able to just know someone will do a good job, for your benefit.

So these are my lessons.  Hopefully you can learn from my journey rather than having to take your own.  But if you can’t, there’s always Bangalore Craigslist.

Hat tip to Tina Hilton at Clerical Advantage who Twittered the blog post mentioned.