Recently we brought on two assistants to work with us on an entertainment industry project. Both assistants are American, but one is an actual assistant and the other is a "virtual assistant". Our goal for the month was to compare and contrast how successful the virtual assistant would be to the actual assistant in getting tasks done.

Every two weeks we pay the actual assistant $100 for making phone calls to potential contacts. They're not allowed to do anything else because of the haphazard way they have done things in the past. When they make their calls, they call us four times a day (at all kinds of hours) and ask us to write down what they did. Sometimes, after they're paid, we don't hear from them for a few days. Other times we're called to answer and resolve problems they have with their other clients. We are also routinely told we're getting them to work for us at a fraction of what they would charge other people despite them being paid at a rate both sides agreed to.

   The virtual assistant we found through Elance.com. They were offering a free trial, so we decided to take them up on their offer. For the free trial, I gave them the same number of tasks the regular assistant has. We answered a few brief questions through email and then received an Excel spreadsheet with the finished tasks in two days. Two days! In two days they did what the real assistant takes two weeks to do. We were so impressed with their work that we brought them on as a regular assistant to work with us on the project. Thus far there have been no hassle and they don't even call with problems. If there is an issue, we get a brief email stating the problem. Their regular rate? $180 for 20 hours of work a month. $20 less than what the real assistant costs with none of the hassle.

In this particular case, it is clear which assistant does a better job; however, not all assistants are created equally. It could be that we have a very bad assistant in person and a very good person, or even team, you don't really know, working online. But here is the greatest problem you will ever face in growing your business, good help is extremely difficult to find. And educated help ,the virtual assistants in this case are American graduate students, are even harder to find.  While education does not make someone more qualified. there is a lot to be said about good judgment and experience, it helps to have someone who knows marketing lingo and can a complex project and define it in a quantifiable fashion the company will understand.

Good help may be hard to find in person, but as Thomas Friedman has proclaimed, we live in a flat world. In this world, you no longer have the excuse of being too busy or uneducated to accomplish your tasks. After all, why should you have to worry when you can have a veritable army of highly educated people out there willing to take on your work and get it done effectively while you sleep?