Getting stuff done "on the road" (extreme)

Today I woke up decided to drive across the country.  I need to make it out to the East Coast for the holidays, my brother flew in to the bay area to meet me and we figured why not.  Well, I’ll tell you why not — because that would be at least a week of lost productivity.

Or would it?

After all, I could take my netbook, tether my iphone and use optask.com to practice what I preach.  I’m usually all about outsourcing things here and there to leverage office time, but I thought it might be a great experiment to actually see how far I can take this whole outsourcing thing.  So, I’ve hit the road and tonight is my first stop (in Barstow, CA) on the way to Washington, DC.

I’m going to chronicle this story as I try to get some stuff done while driving across the country.  Today was spent almost entirely driving until we decided to pull in to Barstow for the evening.  I wish I could say something interesting about Barstow, but other than being a terrific pit-stop halfway between LA and Vegas, there isn’t much else to be said.

On the outsourcing front, there were a couple of things on my to-do list I thought I’d get done today.  First of all, I had to book a hotel for my upcoming trip to Bali.  I’d already submitted an Optask yesterday for someone to pull together a list of hotels based on my criteria (4/5 star, under $100,  in the Nusa Dua area, etc) and today I checked in on that list.  I found one I think  I like, so I’ve submitted another Optask for someone to find the best rate on that hotel for the dates I’m interested in staying.  I think I can find it myself for about $90/night, so I’ll give an update on what Optask turns up.

On the business front, I had a late-night a-ha moment a couple days ago when I thought it might be great to see who else is talking about small business outsourcing — so I had submitted an Optask to find 10 articles that talked about small business outsourcing.  I also asked for the author’s contact information for each of the articles.  Results came back pretty good, and I reached out to one of the authors to see if they want to connect — it would be interesting to me to see how people are currently outsourcing small’ish tasks.

Succeeding as a young entrepreneur

The college dorm is an excellent launching point for many entrepreneurs.  A lot of factors simply line up to make dorms ripe for entrepreneurship: young people with little need for steady income, strong education, technical expertise, cheap rent, flexible schedules and unbridled passion.  However, this is one area where outsourcing hasn’t yet grabbed hold, and it should.  Here are the top 5 reasons why:

1) Time management.

Students have flexible schedules, but not necessarily a ton of time.  In between classes, studying for exams, extracurriculars and a ferocious social life, college students may have great ideas that need to fit into the rather small category of ‘free time’.  Young entrepreneurs shouldn’t allow good ideas that can generate value to gather dust because they don’t have time to execute.  Given the amount of affordable help there is out there, a busy college student should strive to act in a ‘project manager’ role to execute on ideas with a limited amount of time.

2) Opportunity cost.

This is the basis for all outsourcing, but at the college level it often gets ignored.  Common thinking goes, “a college student’s time is not expensive, so a college student should do all the grunt work.”  This may be true for summer internships, but the moment a college entrepreneur’s idea begins to ruin his grades, there is a very real opportunity cost in the education that is being sacrificed.  GPAs cannot be retroactively raised, nor can honors be retroactively pinned onto a degree.  The time to do well in that $100k+ education is now, and if you screw it up, there’s no reset button.

3) Avoid burning out.

Burning out is among the most common reasons for failed college start ups.  It’s not the exciting part of exploring an idea that burns people out, it’s the repetitive, tedious tasks that are required to execute it that burn people out.  These are exactly the kind of tasks that college entrepreneurs should look to outsource.

4) Focus on strengths.

Whatever your strength is, focus on that.  Outsource the rest.  Maybe you’re brilliant at coming up with trading strategies, but you need to clean out thousands of points of historical data — farm that out to India for the price of dinner and a movie!

5) Retain flexibility.

You’ve probably heard by now that very few successful businesses follow the original business plan.  Adapting to market feedback is vastly important, and easier to do if you can push down the gruntwork for those changes on a cheap labor source instead of having to You’ve probably heard by now that very few successful businesses follow the original business plan.  Adapting to market feedback is vastly important, and easier to do if you can push down the gruntwork for those changes on a cheap labor source instead of having to do it yourself.  You can’t deny that there’s a certain hesitation you feel when you know a worthwhile change is going to take a long time.

A recent trend has been the growth of the labor-as-a-service model that various companies are beginning to offer in the B2B scene.  The value proposition of labor-as-a-service is clear – labor on an immediate, flexible and scalable basis.  Small companies can use labor-as-a-service providers to help smooth the huge differences in work capacity between hiring permanent team members as well as allowing each existing permanent team member to leverage their time to get more done.  Large companies have been using labor-as-a-service providers in various existing forms to help outsource non-core competencies.

Examples of the labor-as-a-service model in existing applications abound.  In essence, law firms, accounting firms and most B2B services firms provide LaaS in one form or another.  Your neighborhood corner store could easily go out and hire a partner out of an accounting firm and do all their tax accounting in-house, but they probably don’t.  That’s because it’s not central to what they do and they don’t have enough demand for those services to make it an economically wise decision.  In larger firms, companies such as Office Tiger have allowed the outsourcing of word processing and presentation design work to countries with cheap labor for many years in a very successful way – successful enough for Office Tiger to sell at a $250 million price tag to RR Donnelley.  Companies have used temps, elance and odesk for similar reasons, and virtual assistants are popping up all over the internet.

As the economy rebounds and the capacity of firms are stretched, LaaS will become an even more appealing model for firms looking to stretch their labor and break the common cycle of over-hiring and firing.  And looking to fill that LaaS demand are several players on the market already, including crowdflower, solvate, and (of course) optask.  Each addresses a different area.  Crowdflower looks to harness the decision-making abilities of thousands of workers in the cloud as an add-on to mechanical turk.  Solvate provides a more pure-play LaaS service where you can have someone do whatever can be done remotely at $25/hour.  Optask is also a pure-play LaaS player, but with two clear differentiating factors: 1) immediacy and 2) outsourcing.  Optask is the only solution that allows you to type in what you are looking for, hit submit, and have it automatically routed out of the country to be done at $3/hour.

While the LaaS model has been around in one form or another for a long time, the pure play angle of providing labor to do “whatever can be done remotely” is relatively new.  It should be interesting to see how it evolves moving forward.  It is an idea that is likely to stick on account of the fact that labor on an immediate, flexible and scalable basis is a very compelling proposition in changing times — and, let’s face it, times are always changing.

Yu-kai Chou recently blogged about his negative experiences outsourcing and wisely reminds us not to lose sight of the fact that two variables go into determining the total cost of a project: hourly rate and number of hours spent, and that the number of hours spent – and therefore total cost – can be dramatically higher with a cheaper but more ineffective outsourced team.

So, how can you ensure a positive return on outsourcing? What if we reduced the scale of projects, so that even a large overrun or a disaster on any task will barely have an impact on your bottom line?  What is we broke projects down to various components and outsourced those individually, ensuring continuous input from the core team along the way?

Optask is pioneering is the concept of outsourcing small tasks instead of projects.  By tasks, we mean small bits of work that take anywhere from 15-30 minutes or a few hours to complete.  Instead of writing a whole website, perhaps a developer could plug in to write a single function based on a spec.  Instead of hiring a dedicated full-time virtual assistant, a cloud of workers could plug in on an as-needed basis to help with research tasks, compiling data and other daily annoyances that add up to eat up chunks of the day.  Optask’s platform lets you do just this.

It’s not quite crowdsourcing like Mechanical Turk, and it’s certainly different from traditional proejct outsourcing sites.  Of course, there are trade-offs with our approach, but we think there’s a place for our service.  We invite you to Optask something today.

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Outsourcing is not just for businesses these days.  Consumers can take advantage of the fact that people around the world have Skype and can make calls on your behalf, especially those painful ones that have been dwelling at the bottom of your todo list for days and weeks.  Need to find out the return policy of a flight that you’ve already used one leg of?  Need to ask an airline how much it would cost to upgrade a specific flight?  Trying to find out where and how to send a broken product back under the manufacturer’s warranty?  There are all prime examples of where an outsourced assistant could step in and save you minutes and hours.

Sure, there are limits on what an outsourced can do for you.  For one, you might not want to trust an assistant with your sensitive information like credit card numbers and passwords, but that still leaves many situations where an extra hand might come in handy.

the ultimate goal

I’ve discovered the incredible feeling of outsourcing everyday tasks relating to both personal and business to-do’s.  Nothing beats the feeling of moving 7 out of my 10 annoying to-do’s off my list and onto someone else’s for a price that absolutely makes sense.  So far I’ve been able to outsource a ton of my vacation research for my upcoming trip to Bali as well as outsourcing tedious google work relating to marketing Optask (i.e., “build me a list of 30 names and email addresses of sole proprietor legal professionals in the bay area…”).  I almost make a habit of spending my last hour at work smartly crafting these tasks and outsourcing them at optask.com before heading home nice and early to crack open a beer and watch TV.  Coming in the next day to see all the tasks completed is a pretty amazing feeling.

But as I try and explain the value of this to my friends, there are some people that get it and some people that don’t.  The most common criticisms I hear are the following:

…couldn’t I just do that myself?

Absolutely.  And Michael Jordan could absolutely mow his lawn faster than whoever’s doing it right now.  And you can absolutely iron your own dress shirts for cheaper and in less time than it takes to have a cleaner do it.  But I bet Michael Jordan doesn’t mow his own lawn, and you probably still drop your shirts off at the cleaners.  Why?  This is a textbook case of absolute vs. comparative advantage.  Despite having the absolute advantage in many things, it is almost always worth having someone else do  it for you if your opportunity cost is much higher than what it costs to have someone else do it.  I could do everything on my to-do list myself and go home at 8pm instead of 4pm, but if I can outsource that work at $3/hour, is it worth $12 for me to go home FOUR HOURS EARLY?  Yeah.

…how do I know the outsourced people will do a good job?

I’m fairly surprised by the popularity of this question because it is a lot more analogous to “how do I know I can effectively manage a team?” than most people are willing to admit.  Outsourcing is not a silver bullet — it is a resource.  In the Marines, we have a saying — “there is no such thing as a bad fire team, only bad fire team leaders.”  You probably wouldn’t task an 18-year-old fresh out of boot camp with determining the coalition strategy in Afghanistan, so why would you expect someone working in the Phillippines for $3/hour to become a subject matter expert overnight and write you a encyclopedia-worthy summary in 45 minutes?  Wouldn’t it be more effective to have that person find you the top 10 blogs on the matter and synthesize the knowledge yourself?  That would be leveraging your time through effective employment of outsourcing.

…it takes more time to find someone to do the task than to do the task myself

This is a common criticism from those who haven’t discovered all the resources out there that remove that friction.  Sure, you probably won’t go on elance and go through the trouble of posting a small task, selecting a provider, negotiating a rate, etc.  But, you could easily go on a site like optask.com and just type in the task, hit submit and be done with it.  Or, if you’re among the few that have a LOT of use for outsourcing small tasks, find a virtual assistant who will work with you on an as-needed basis (although, admittedly, the trouble of finding someone does add some friction to the process).

Of course, everyday outsourcing has its limitations.  The key is to learning to manage those limitations and harness the resource to leverage your time.  Figure out how to do it right and you’ll be skating out of the office early, too.  Kind of reminds me of my days as an investment banking analyst, where they introduced an outsource team in India that we could ask to have staffed on our projects.  Investment banking analysts became absolute champions at effective outsourcing because their ability to do so made the difference between a 100 hour work week and an 80 hour work week (the latter allows for getting hammered on Friday night).

Ultimately, the thing to keep in mind is that where you stand to benefit from outsourcing is in the day-to-day stuff that anybody could do (advanced googling, reformatting documents, etc).  Investment advisors who outsource the building of their websites save no real time since they probably lacked the skill to do it on their own, anyway.  But those that outsource lead-generation by having someone search for phone numbers of all doctors, lawyers and accountants in their neighborhood save time on something they would have had to do by themselves.  That’s why I think everyday outsourcing for the everyday task and the everyday person is the future of outsourcing.

A large part of effectively managing a team involves choosing the right tools for communication and collaboration.  In years prior, we’ve been constrained to conference calls, email and sending files back and forth.  Raise your hand if you’ve seen a file named something like draft_presentation_v4_(reviewed-9-4-04).ppt.  Cringe.  Believe it or not, such practices are still rampant in the corporate world today.

Thankfully, a whole suite of products exist to make working together easier than ever.  Even better, most of these are free.  The trick is figuring out which of these are worth using and how to effectively implement them within your team.  Daniel has complained that I’ve signed up up for more stuff lately than he has in years of being online.  True, there is a limit to how many tools you can start using before you diminishing and negative returns set in.  Over the months, we’ve settled on a few core ones.  I’ll go through them and explain how we fit it into our day-to-day work here at Optask.

Google Docs. Still the most robust and reliable online Word replacement.  My one big gripe is that the file manager is unintuitive and clunky, and it’s difficult to keep your documents organized.  One solution is to just give up and leave it up to the search function to find anything.  Another issue is that collaborative editing is not real-time, though you can see at any point who else is editing the document.  Sharing documents can be a bit of a pain, as you’ll have to individually manage access and ensure that all your other collaborators have Google accounts.  By using Share > Get Link to Share however, you’ll be able get a link that you can simply be emailed around to your group.  This is what I usually do.

Google Groups.  My defacto listserv.  Gets the job done, but can be a pain to add and delete email addresses.  Why can’t there be a simple hosted listserv where I can just add and delete email addresses via a simple delimited text file?  Definitely beats long email strings, and a handy archive of messages is available for anyone joining in late to the party.  Google Wave is still being rolled out, and it’ll be interesting to watch how it gets adopted into group communication.

Etherpad.  Etherpad is a very handy little tool that lets you create one-off, temporary, semi-secure writing pads that can be shared and edited in real-time.  I’ve used Etherpad tremendously effectively on calls to share agendas and take minutes right there on the spot.  It’s incredibly lightweight and doesn’t require anyone to sign up.

Dropbox.  Sharing files, especially large ones, can be unwieldy.  Dropbox is a pretty neat solution that syncs a single folder on your hard drive to a dropbox “in the cloud”, and propagates any uploads/deletions to all other machines which are synced to that dropbox.  You get the best of both worlds, as you maintain local access to the files for quick access while all other clients are seamlessly updated.  Dropbox is currently meant for a single user to sync across all his devices, but a group can easily use Dropbox to sync a shared folder.

Skype.  Our long distance bills would be astronomical without Skype, especially given I’m only on the 300 minute iPhone plan these days.  Skype’s unlimited calling plans to North America or the World is a steal.  Don’t forget to pair it up with an Everyman headset, which improves sound quality dramatically.

I’d be interested in hearing what other tools you use and how you use them in your business.  Please share your thoughts in the comments below.