The Latest Outsourcing Wave Personal Assistants

In the latest twist on globalization, it is now possible to hire a personal assistant — in India — to take care of just about anything you don’t have time to do and that can be accomplished via phone or the Internet.

Need your daughter’s birthday party organized? A snowplow to clear your driveway? Your resume and cover letter sent out to potential employers? How about a romantic vegan dinner for two delivered to your home, complete with live music A personal assistant working from a cubicle in Bangalore or Hyderabad now can arrange all that and a whole lot more, and not just for the long-pampered uber-rich but for a much bigger market: America’s exhausted middle class.“Anything that’s illegal or in bad taste we will not do. Other than that, bring it on,” said T.T. Venkatash, a senior manager for Get Friday.

Personal and small-business services are the latest wave of outsourcing to India and one that is rapidly picking up speed, despite concerns about the wisdom of relying so much on overseas service providers.

Today, a handful of Indian startup companies in the personal and small-business services field are handling US$200 million worth of calls for help from overwhelmed firms and harried individuals worldwide, said P. Sunder, chief executive of TTK Services, the parent company of Get Friday. By 2015, industry income should hit $2 billion, predicts Evalueserve, an outsourcing research and consulting company.

Doing the Busy Work

Each outsourcing firm has its own specialty. One, called “TutorVista,” focuses on linking Indian tutors with students in the U.S. and elsewhere. Another, Ask Sunday, handles personal tasks for as little as $29 a month, plus larger project work.
The companies have a similar goal: helping clients, most of them in the United States, wade through an ever-deepening sea of mundane chores without overtaxing their pocketbooks or their sanity.“People on the way to O’Hare [airport] shoot us requests on their BlackBerries, asking us to check their flight status,” said Avinash Samudrala, a St. Louis, Mo., native who cofounded Ask Sunday last year. “It’s pretty amazing if you think about it.”
Get Friday, launched in 2005, started with just one desk, a handful of employees and fewer than 100 customers. Today it has 200 cubicles, spread over several floors of a dusty, nondescript commercial building on Bangalore’s outskirts, 140 employees and 1,200 clients, 95 percent of them in the United States.

Wake-Up Calls

During a recent night shift — the busiest hours thanks to the average 12-hour time difference from the United States — young women in colorful saris and young men in button-down shirts crouched over computer keyboards, sipping milky Indian tea and working on problems a world away.

One organized a program for a dance competition; another updated a Web site for a client preparing for a Professional Golf Association merchandising show in Orlando. One woman researched the fiber content in dog food while another sent her boss a daily inspirational quote, per his request.

Others have devised complicated wake-up call systems to rout the terminally sleepy from bed, battled with airlines over lost luggage or developed diet plans for the hefty, even arranging to have groceries delivered lest their clients weaken in the Oreo aisle. After Hurricane Katrina, the company managed to track down the missing relative of one client by trolling through government Web sites listing the displaced, company officials said.

“It’s really fun. Each day we experience new things,” said Sahnaz, 21, the shift’s best technical writer who, like many southern Indians, uses only one name — as she churned out an article on “How to Be Your Own Construction Contractor.”

No Term Papers, Please

What the assistants can do is limited mainly by the imagination of their bosses. Hui, after persuading his Indian assistant to sing a song over the phone to a delighted friend, created his own serenade outsourcing company, TajTunes, with the assistant’s help.

Another client, a frustrated U.S. diplomat in Pakistan, had the company track down someone who could explain to her Urdu-speaking maid how to properly feed the cat.
The companies occasionally have to draw the line. Get Friday turned down a New Zealand man’s request to create a database of all the escort services in that country. Then there was the student who wanted his assistant to “read the following essay, answer the following question in tightly written, double-spaced text, and get it back by Monday,” Venkatash remembers. “We said no.”

At Get Friday, each client is assigned a personal assistant, but behind the scenes a larger team — which includes Web site designers, teachers and accountants, among others — often collaborates on jobs. Company officials say the team approach offers clients an advantage over hiring a personal assistant at home, who, besides costing four times as much, might be skilled at answering phones but not managing books, or a whiz at party planning but unable to put tax receipts in a spreadsheet.
“With a full-time admin, I have to supervise them and, if there’s a lull in their work activity, ‘find’ work to keep them busy,” said Richard Hawksworth, who runs a small media production company in Chicago and signed up with Get Friday six months ago after his previous personal assistant moved out of state.

Now, “I call when I need something, and I pay for the work they provide — no stress or anxiety about unproductive time or employees.” For somebody who is “spread very thin,” he says, “that’s huge.”Venkatash insists his company isn’t stealing U.S. jobs, the usual criticism of outsourcing, though party planners and database management companies would probably disagree。