I think Hiring an Overseas Assistant is a horrible idea.
There are 1 or 2 exceptions, which I’ll outline later, but - TLDR - it’s a bad idea. The experience is almost always far more painful and significantly more expensive than hiring domestically.
I speak from experience, having hired multiple Assistants overseas, including the most commonly mentioned countries: India, Pakistan, the Philippines. Everytime I thought I’d save money, I ended up frustrated with how much time and money I’d wasted.
Turns out being cheap is incredibly expensive.
My First Assistant was in India
She was an amazing human - kind, smart, ambitious, resourceful - everything you could ask for.
One day she simply disappeared. I tried emailing her, DM’ing her on Skype, everything I could think of, but she was nowhere to be found. For days I tried contacting her, all unsuccessfully.
Something wasn’t right - this wasn’t like her at all.
One week later, suddenly she reappeared with a flurry of messages, all of them deeply apologetic.
Turns out a politician from her neighborhood got into a dispute with a rival politician. In retaliation, the rival politician had all electricity turned off to my Assistant's neighborhood. My Assistant had no electricity or internet for a whole week, with no way to contact me.
I was stunned.
In that moment, it struck me how fragile the whole situation was.
I depended on my Assistant, and she depended on the (in)stability of her country’s infrastructure and political climate. It didn’t matter how “rockstar” my Assistant was, she was no more than an ant on the elephant of her country’s infrastructure, and if the elephant decided to take a snooze, she had no choice but to sit on the sidelines too.
We parted ways soon thereafter.
Overseas Is Appealing Because it Seems Cheaper
Most Entrepreneurs, overwhelmed and desperate to get their time back, assume hiring an Assistant is too expensive.
Then they hear about hiring overseas for $5/hr and think: “5 hours of help per week is only $25/week; I can afford that!” Their heart flutters as an oasis appears on the horizon. They imagine getting mundane tasks off their plate like uploading content to their members area and posting to social media.
All too soon, though, the dysfunction of working with an Overseas Assistant starts to kick in and our heroic Entrepreneur soon realizes the oasis is nothing more than a mirage.
The 4 Dysfunctions of Hiring Overseas
1. Radically Different Time Zone
Because Overseas Assistants are in radically different time zones, it’s incredibly difficult to collaborate with them, and meetings are tough to coordinate.
They’re often around 12 hours different from you. Their (reasonable, sustainable) work day overlaps with you only around their 6am, which is your 6pm, or their 6pm, which is your 6am. I don’t know about you, but I don’t love the idea of regularly taking meetings at 6pm or 6am!
And even if I put up with it, I really dislike that there’s only one time slot per day where we could meet if there needed.
Like, what if I have an emergency where I can’t find a critical document I’ll need later in the day? A Domestic Assistant could probably find a way to help me within an hour or two, even if they worked only part time with me.
And collaboration - my oh my what a nightmare!
Imagine this scenario:
6pm your time: you train your Assistant to do task XYZ
7pm your time: you sign off
11pm your time: while you’re sleeping, your Overseas Assistant does their best on the task, but gets it wrong. You’re sleeping and have no idea.
9am your time: you wake up to discover your Assistant’s errors. Unfortunately that’s their 9pm so you can’t communicate with them - they’re already signed off for the day. So you have to wait until your 6pm (their 6 am) to meet, correct their work, and coach them. It’s now been 24 hours since you thought your Assistant would take over the task.
Here’s hoping you don’t have to do 2,3,4,5,10 revisions, because each time you do, it’s going to cost you 2,3,4,5,10 days.
Compare that with a Domestic Assistant:
10am: you teach task
1015am: they try and fail
1030am: you find out, correct work and coach them
1045am: they try again
1100am: you give them more coaching
1115am: they got it right
TOTAL Time: 75 minutes, not 2 DAYS.
Massive time saver.
2. Radically Different Language
When your Assistant doesn’t have a native-level understanding of your main language, so much gets lost in translation.
Each time mistakes and misunderstandings occur, you’re forced to stop what you’re doing, fix it, coach them, and try to get re-oriented before the mistake happened. That’s called “change-over,” when you switch from one task to another. So inefficient.
Also, will your followers, clients, students have a tough time understanding what your Assistant is saying?
If you really want a massive productivity boost, delegate your email inbox to your Assistant. Changed my life when I did - I instantly had an extra 10 hours per week to focus on the big things in my business.
But what if your Assistant has poor / broken English in their emails, what impression does that give your clients? When your Assistant’s English is bad, they can’t schedule meetings for you, do customer support, or moderate any of your events or communities.
Language barriers severely limit how much work your Assistant can take off your plate.
3. Radically Different Business Culture
This one really struck me the first time I hired someone from the Phillipines.
Turns out there’s something called “The 13th Month.” It’s a mandatory compensation that is provided by Filipino employers to rank-and-file Filipino employees, due by Dec 24th each year. It was passed into law on December 16, 1975 after President Ferdinand Marcos signed Presidential Decree No. 851.
As an international employer offering a contract, I wasn’t legally required to pay it. That said, it’s a big part of Filipino culture, and it could be the difference between a worker staying or leaving, so I paid it.
How many other cultural nuances are there which are different in the USA / CAN compared to where your Assistant lives? All the same “lost in translation” headaches I mentioned above related to language gaps are just as liable to happen in culture gaps.
Related is the legal system.
Third-world countries have very different legal systems and operate far more often on bribes. Should something unfortunate happen, I would have no idea how to take legal action in Mumbai (India) or Manila (Philippines). Like, how do I walk into a Manila police station where they speak zero English, and try to understand my rights or open a case?
Terrifying.
4. (In)stability
My first Assistant was a perfect example of how the political environment was so shaky her electricity got cut off.
I’ve also had Overseas Assistants who had to quit because there were mercenaries who invaded their village. Others who quit because of a natural disaster. Others who quit because they had to sell their computer to make money so they could by food.
These are extremely sad and unfortunate circumstances.
It’s also incredibly unworkable to rely on workers who live in those circumstances.
Like, when my meeting dropped mid-call because of rolling brownouts in their city, and they had no gas for their backup generator, how am I supposed to get things done?
Here in the US and Canada we take all of our stability for granted. When we flick a light switch, we expect the lights to turn on 100% of the time. Yes, we still have political uprisings and natural disasters. But the Jan 6, 2021, attack on Capitol Hill in Washington DC didn’t wipe out anyone’s electricity, internet, or utilities.
We don’t realize just how vulnerable overseas workers can be. They can be the brightest and best human beings, and yet still get wiped out by factors out of their control.
The Greatest Cost of All
Your time.
If you value your time at even $50/hr, then every hour you spend fixing an Assistant’s mistake is an hour of your time ($50/hr) plus an hour of their time to learn and fix ($5/hr), for a whopping total of $55/hr to fix mistakes.
But it gets worse: Opportunity Cost. The hour you spent fixing your Assistant’s mistakes is an hour you weren’t working on high-level tasks that can create thousands in new revenue for you, such as creating content or working 1-on-1 with top clients. That’s the big, BIG loss to you and your company. How often do you want to pay that cost?
It’s perfectly natural for any Assistant, even Domestic Assistants, to make mistakes from time to time. That’s okay and to be expected. It’s a necessary price to pay to help your Assistant become stronger, faster, more skilled, more accurate. Excellent!
The multitude of errors and delays working with Assistants overseas, caused solely because of differences in language, culture, timezone, or instability, are completely unnecessary. Unacceptable!
Worse, these errors compound quickly. An error from a language gap can’t get fixed because of timezone delays, and then your Assistant misunderstands your instructions, but can’t reply for two days because of a rolling brown-out. The merry-go-round spins and spins, you getting more nauseous each trip around. By the time you’re fixing the same error for the 4th, 5th time, I wouldn’t blame you for throwing your arms up in the air and saying, “Forget it. I’ll just do it myself!”
I know that’s what I did.
Being Cheap is Incredibly Expensive
Looking at all the wasted time and energy I put into dealing with Overseas mistakes, I decided I had no choice but to finally just hire Domestically, either form the US or Canada:
Similar / Same timezone
Similar / same business culture
Similar / same language
Similar / same stability
This decision was hard for me because of how broke I was.
My net worth was -$200K after the real estate crash of 2009, and my annual sales were only $39,000. So - believe me - paying North American wages was terrifying.
I was exhausted, though, and was desperate for help.
And I knew I’d never fulfill my potential in this lifetime if I kept trying to be a Solopreneneur, doing everything myself. So that’s when I turned to Domestic Assistants. Miraculously, in the first 12 months after hiring Sarah, my first ever USA-based Virtual Assistant, I made $107,000, nearly tripling my income.
Results like that made me see the light, and I quickly realized that being cheap was incredibly expensive.
The Only Time I’d Ever Consider Hiring Overseas Again
The only situation where I’d consider hiring Overseas again is for tasks that:
Repeat, over and over, every single month
Have no decision making, just straight SOPs
Require little / no real-time collaboration with me or anyone on my team located stateside
Have flexible deadlines
Examples I can think of right away for this are data entry, and / or data management, especially where we’re grabbing old data and adding it to a database, so deadlines are flexible.
Hiring a Great Assistant Can Change Your Life
If you’re an Entrepreneur who feels overwhelmed with minutiae, the right Assistant can change your life. For example, I now read, write, and respond to fewer than 10 emails per week. Simply Wow!
Just make sure you’re getting the right kind of Assistant.
And be careful about being too cheap. It could be the most expensive mistake you make.
Onwards and Upwards,
Tim :)