Brooke: Toby and I are often asked for specific examples of how we have effectively used our offshore assistant. This is usually from somebody interested in hiring one. Recently, I had the opportunity to try out the services of Brickworks (a competitor to Get Friday, the service that Toby and I use). I got fantastic results using a Brickworks offshore assistant for conducting research. First I had him help me find a dentist and then I had him determine the contact information for some individuals that I needed to email. For both of these tasks, I provided extremely detailed directions and spreadsheets to fill out – this is key to using an offshore assistant effectively.

Finding a dentist
I’m new to San Francisco, and my dentist in Palo Alto unfortunately ended our relationship when he asked me out on a date and proceeded to make advances on some of my friends. I needed to find a dentist who was good, included on my new insurance plan, and near my office. Getting recommendations from friends is hard unless they have the same insurance as you. And the website of my insurance company is entirely useless – it only provides names and locations.

So I decided to ask Brickworks to help. I created a spreadsheet for my offshore assistant to fill out that included the following fields: Dentist name, address, dental school, # of years in practice, reviews/comments, days and hours of operation, first available appointment. I chose these fields because I thought they would provide a good screen. I don’t want a dentist that just started, but I also don’t want one that’s been in practice for a million years and is therefore using ancient techniques. I also don’t want a dentist that has an appointment for the following day – a sign that he’s probably not very good – but I don’t want one that can’t see me for months.

I provided Brickworks with a list of 15 dentists near my office, and they got to work. I instructed them to spend no more than 30 minutes researching each dentist (important to do or there is a possibility that they will spend many hours researching one dentist) and I directed them to reviews sites such as Yelp. I got back a perfectly populated template (with interim updates every day), and from this information I was able to quickly scan through a select a dentist who had received many 5-star reviews on yelp, had an appointment within a month, and had a cool looking website that implied she was “with the times” as far as technology is concerned.

If I had tried to do this myself, I would have spent at least 2 hours of my own time obsessing over which dentist to choose and searching google for hours on end to find out as much information as possible. And I probably wouldn’t have researched as many dentists. This was a much better approach.

And my dentist? I loved her. Dr. Rahbar is kind of like Amelie – both in looks and mannerisms - and did an absolutely fantastic cleaning job. She also told me to floss better in a way that actually made me want to do it.

Researching contact information
My success at finding a dentist prompted me to use Brickworks for another, more challenging task. I had a list of individuals for whom I wanted email addresses. At first, the results were poor – their Google searches just didn’t work. I was a bit discouraged, but then I decided to try to do the work myself and figure out if I could develop a methodology that could then be shared. I eventually determined that the key was identifying the email format for the company the individual worked at. So I instructed Brickworks to search for @companyname.com. This invariably yielded an email address for somebody within the company – and from this, Brickworks was able to construct the email address for the specific individual I was interested in. While the results weren’t perfect, they were pretty good. And definitely more than I would have had the capacity for. The big learning from this experiment was that for trickier tasks, it often makes sense to invest in developing your own methodology and then teach that to your offshore assistant. This investment was well worth it due to the size of the task.

What’s Next?
I’m now back to Get Friday – our original assistant Suresh got promoted, so now we have Sahnaz who seems to be quite competent. I’m eager to see how her research skills stack up to Brickworks. This week, she’s going to be helping me find a doctor and order a turkducken for Thanksgiving.

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