Are you a doer, or a getitdone-er?

So here’s an interesting turn of events. I tried offshoring. Yep. I tried offshoring to VAs working for a company in Asia. Never thought I'd do it. Bet you didn't either, huh?

I thought I should try it. So that when I turn up my nose at it, I’d be doing it with the conviction of someone speaking from a position of experience, and not just opinion without evidence.

And here’s what I found (which is, btw, exactly what I expected to find).

They’re quick, and very polite/friendly. The polite/friendly stuff is canned (meaning, they say they write the same polite/friendly things every time. Still, the upbeat nature of the correspondence was nice.

They’re very good at simple, no-brainer kinds of things with only one possible answer. Like, “In which Shrek movie does the Puss In Boots character first appear, and what's the name of the actor who did that character's voice?” Or, “Please find for me the URL to the page on the Zena Moon site where the "House Blessing" kit is sold, and let me know the price of it.” Or, “Please find the source of the following quotation: ‘Life is a gift, and I try to respond with grace and courtesy.’”

But add in the need to use some discernment skills or critical assessment/thinking skills, and it pretty much falls to pieces. For instance, “Please find me several web sites where I can download free or inexpensive ($10 or less) Power Point templates.” That one yielded a list of URLs, the first one of which required me to join a club for a hundred bucks.

“Find me five high-quality (many listeners) internet radio shows (Blog Talk Radio or TalkShoe preferred) hosted by women who target women in transition, or solopreneurs, or older moms, or boomer women,” yielded me eight links…none of which were BTR or TS shows, two of them were shows that hadn’t been broadcast in over a year, one was a show solely about quilting, another was a show about God, two had next to no listeners, one was really good, and one was so-so.

I borrowed a couple of topics from our community at AssistU, wanting to see what they came up with. “I am formatting an e-book. The book is prepared in Word, and then gets converted to pdf. I want to "hide" long and affiliate URLs. Is it possible to hide that URL, or make it show something else while keeping the link clickable? (For example, in the document, the link says "www.yoursite.com", and when you mouse over that link, can you make the destination url appear as "www.yoursite.com" while it actually takes you to your affiliate site when clicked on?). What are my options?” I was presented with links to three pieces of software—no suggestions about which might be best, or anything else. Bam…that ball was back in my court. As it turned out, none of them would have really solved the problem.

Another: “I need to find talented Ning designers. Can you please pull together a list of five or so for me, along with examples of the Ning communities they've designed?” That brought back four URLs to Ning networks—none of which seemed to have anything to do with whoever designed them. The first of those links took me to a guy who works for Ning.

Maybe this is where our culturally different uses of the English language start to fail us. Others were most certainly problems with language. Like this one:

“Based on Twitter Grader's Twitter Elite, who, in the top 100 should I be following if I want to connect with affluent women in transition?” They didn’t understand this at all. Not at all. To their credit, they told me they didn’t understand what I wanted. What it felt like to me was that they knew nothing about Twitter. But I was thinking—this is a company with many “VAs” working in a call center. Shouldn’t they have a way to collaborate and help each other serve the customers well with things they individually don't know about?

It was then that I realized how much this was like a monetized version of ChaCha.

If you don’t know ChaCha, it’s a human-driven search engine. You text, call in, or type in a web interface a question, and the ChaCha guides send you back an answer in pretty speedy fashion. They're really only good with basic questions with only one correct answer.

That’s exactly what this VA service was. Simple, quick, answers. No real solutions.

Now, granted, it was just $69/month. But I'm thinking, why pay for it when I can get it for free?

And I’m writing about it today, not especially to tell you my experience, or to decree that offshoring bites, but to share this Bit O’Moxie:

If you are a doer, and not a getitdone-er…if you are giving clients answers but no real solutions…if you find what you’re asked for, but don’t connect the dots and answer the next question and the one after that (without the client actually having to voice those questions), returning to your client answers with solutions, then you, my friend, can bend over and kiss your ass goodbye—‘cause there’s no way you’ll be able to compete with the offshored VAs for providing, in essence, the same level of service.

Am I suggesting you be a mind reader? Not in the least. But I am suggesting you learn your clients at every turn, creating an internal database of knowledge about each of them that you can then draw from when you are looking at vendors, services, solutions. And I'm suggesting you work to develop your discernment and critical thinking skills.

Want to keep your clients? Be indispensible. Create custom solutions to every challenge or opportunity. Go beyond the obvious answer to the answer your client likely wants—and provide that.

You think it’s hard skills clients clamor for? You think you need to know how to use a cart, or handle social media strategy, or be a copywriter for sales pages, or any other particular “hot” skill? That’s not it at all—a trained monkey can do that stuff. Really. What they clamor for is your brain. Your critical thinking. Your creativity. Your knowledge, experience, expertise, and network. Your ability to connect dots that aren't there to be seen by the average trained monkey Joe. They want and need your soft skills.

Most of all, they clamor for you to make things easy for them. You don’t do that when your brains shuts off at the first level of thinking. Go deeper. Go broader. Therein lies your future, and your success.

Comments

[Teresa]

Thanks for sharing this experience! It really sheds some light on whether or not offshoring is right for some. I have flip-flopped on the idea but think I would rather give the work to someone here "at home" in the US esp since we're experiencing such economic stress...there's sure to be plenty of people out there to handle complex projects.

[Bette Arnold]

This post was so perfectly timed! I am resurrecting my business and you have alleviated my last "hesitation". I think the biggest thing that has slowed me down in the past has been my FEAR that I would not have sufficient technical skills.

Once upon a time, I was actually hired by a large national company to THINK - come up with ideas to help change processes a large department used to complete projects. I will never know why I thought that would not translate into the virtual world.

Thanks Stacy for rescuing me!

Bette Arnold