SmallBizResource Blog -- Productivity

Small Businesses Can Outsource Too

Posted by Naomi Grossman Friday, Nov 16, 2007, 10:49 AM ET

Anyone who runs a small business knows that it's not the big, interesting projects that are overwhelming. It's the daily, tedious tasks that can be most time-consuming -- and most frustrating.

But now that the concept of outsourcing is trickling down from large to midsize to small businesses, those businesses that can't afford to hire extra staff to wade through their email and weed out what's important or monitor their calendars and set up appointments can get someone -- for cheap -- in India to do it for them.

The New York Times reports on this latest twist in the outsourcing trend: "Thanks to Indian companies like Brickwork India and GetFriday, even sole proprietors can have personal assistants to conduct research, monitor the Web, make appointments and even give them a wake-up call and tell them to get some exercise — all for as little as $15 an hour."

Outsourcing the little stuff is a notion that has been heavily promoted by Timothy Ferris, who insists that by doing that -- as well as other ways of limiting information intake -- a four-hour workweek is possible.

Most small businesses would like to get down to a 40-hour workweek and, according to the NYT article, many are trying to get there by using "assistants" in India. The prices are almost uniformly reasonable but the results, at least according to this article, are mixed.

"People in the United States who have used the services of companies like Brickwork and GetFriday say they have wrestled with miscommunication, poorly received instructions and work that has not met expectations."

But as Gartner Group vice president and analyst Frances Karamouzis notes in the article, the movement is still in its "infancy." She adds that, "Failures result when the person doing the outsourcing has not set the right expectations or is not properly understood."

One entrepreneur in the article figured out how to get around those hurdles. He outsourced his daily tasks to college students right here in the good old U.S.

Productivity | SmallBizResource