17

Mar

Virtual Assistants: Get Friday Review: Losing Their Edge

Posted by: Jeremy Reither

Right around the same time I signed up for my Brickwork India Virtual Assistant, I registered with Get Friday, too. I wanted to work with the two big name Virtual Assistant (VA) firms simultaneously, so I could compare apples to apples. But if you’ll read my Virtual Assistant Firm Reviews (including this one), you’ll see the results vary widely. As I mentioned in my ‘VA’™s – Hit and Miss‘ post, it’s not always all it’s cracked up to be. With that in mind, below is a summary of my experience with two Get Friday VA’s from October, 2007 to February, 2008:

Cost: $15/hr plus $10/month administrative for “pay as you go” plan (price breaks to as low as $7/hr for 160 hours/month plan)

The Sign-up Process: After reading The 4-Hour Workweek (review) Get Friday was the second VA firm I contacted (after Brickwork India). Or maybe I could say it was the third firm, since I actually contacted their parent company (Your Man in India) first – only to find out they had recently spun off Get Friday. Just like Brickwork, these guys took a long time to get back to me after my initial application – about a week.

After their initial response we had several back and forth communications regarding the type of work I needed done. After I told them I needed a VA who could do internet research, prepare PowerPoint slideshows, and update content on one of my websites (using a point-and-click content management system (CMS)), they straight up told me that they couldn’t help me. They didn’t offer a more experienced VA, they didn’t tell me which tasks were “un-doable.” They just said “sorry.”

I could have left it at that and moved on – and I’m sure some people would have. But I was curious about which tasks were outside of their comfort zone. So, I modified my list of requirements – this time excluding the CMS updates. And whaddaya know? Everything was suddenly cool. I signed the contract, and was assigned my first VA.

Payments / Billing: Fortunately Get Friday takes credit cards (Brickwork does not), and they just bill you automatically at the end of each period. Because I bought the “Pay as You Go” plan, Get Friday also did a decent job of sending weekly spreadsheets with details about how much my VA spent on my tasks. I asked my VA to add some detail to his weekly spreadsheets (explaining which tasks he was working on), and he obliged. Nice.

VA Talent: If I was evaluating “VA friendliness,” then Get Friday would get high marks. Everyone I dealt with at Get Friday was extremely friendly. Especially my VA’s. I say VA’s (plural), though, because I burned through two of them pretty quickly. The quality of work was sorely lacking – from both of them. Simple research tasks, like finding and then copying and pasting data from the web into large Excel spreadsheets, was done well enough (although there were revisions required on every task).

But as soon as I assigned a task of creating a PowerPoint presentation, there was chaos. I gave a broad explanation and a simple objective for the presentation at first, but quickly realized that giving the Get Friday VA any creative freedom was a bad idea. I was shown a junior high school level PowerPoint presentation with unformatted graphics, mismatching alignment from slide to slide, random font size and style, and a general lack of continuity. Over the course of about a week (10-20 hours of work on the part of the VA; 2-5 hours of my own time), the VA created absolutely nothing of use. I had to scrap the work and ask the supervisor for a new VA. On a positive note, the VA was transitioned fairly quickly and smoothly, and my new VA said he had intimate knowledge of the subject to be presented in the PowerPoint slideshow. Unfortunately I soon saw that his work quality was barely any better. After breaking the task into smaller steps (starting with the creation an outline for the presentation), we were still unable to make any progress. I ultimately decided that working with Get Friday was costing me far too much (time and money). I cancelled my account after 4 months.

Communications: Responsiveness of my VA was also very poor. I’m sure this was partly because I had the “Pay as You Go” plan, and my VA’s were busy with other clients. But a couple times I had to get a supervisor involved, to light a fire under the VA and get him to respond to me. Generally supervisors responded comparatively quickly (within 1 business day). Grasp of the English language, on the other hand, was universally weak. Compared to my communications with Brickwork, it was difficult to communicate with my Get Friday VA’s.

Work Schedule: Because my Get Friday VA’s worked during my business hours (their nights) they were available to assign work to during the day – and I was available to answer questions during their work day. However, because I was also using a VA from Brickwork at the same time, I found I was spending too much time managing (assigning and checking) work throughout the day (for Get Friday) and in the evening (for Brickwork). I have to imagine that if my day-working VA was more competent than my evening-working VA, I would appreciate the day-work schedule. But since my day-working VA (Get Friday) required such hand-holding, and I didn’t enjoy working with him, I actually came to appreciate the evening work schedule, where I assign work in the evening and wake up in the morning to review progress updates.

Overall Rating: 2 out of 5

My Get Friday VA’s performed some tasks to satisfaction (basic research and spreadsheet creation), but I found that tasks of any higher level of complexity or requiring any creativity were executed very poorly. I asked for a replacement VA, but my 2nd Get Friday VA wasn’t any better than my first. So, I cancelled my account after 4 months.

Also see: other Virtual Assistant Firm Reviews