The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Update - Timothy Ferriss [56]
Team preference doesn’t mean that bigger is better, just that multiple people are better than one person. The best VA I have used to date is an Indian with five backup assistants under him. Three can be more than sufficient, but two is toeing the line.
The #1 Fear: “Sweetheart, Did You Buy
a Porsche in China?”
I’m sure you might have your fears. AJ certainly did:
My outsourcers now know an alarming amount about me—not just my schedule but my cholesterol, my infertility problems, my Social Security number, my passwords (including the one that is a particularly adolescent curse word). Sometimes I worry that I can’t piss off my outsourcers or I’ll end up with a $12,000 charge on my MasterCard bill from the Louis Vuitton in Anantapur.
The good news is that misuse of financial and confidential information is rare. In all of the interviews I conducted for this section, I could find only one case of information abuse, and I had to search long and hard. It involved an overworked U.S.-based VA who hired freelance help at the last moment.
Commit to memory the following—never use the new hire. Prohibit small-operation VAs from subcontracting work to untested freelancers without your written permission. The more established and higher-end firms, Brickwork in the below example, have security measures that border on excessive and make it simple to pinpoint abusers in the case of a breach:
Employees undergo background checks and sign NDAs (nondisclosure agreements) in accordance with the company policy of maintaining confidentiality of client information
Electronic access card for entry and exit
Credit card information keyed only by select supervisors
Removal of paper from the offices is prohibited
VLAN-based access restrictions between different teams; this ensures that there is no unauthorized access of information between people of different teams in the organization
Regular reporting on printer logs
Floppy drives and USB ports disabled
BS779 certification for accomplished international security standards
128-bit encryption technology for all data exchange
Secure VPN connection
I bet there is a fair chance that sensitive data is 100 times safer with Brickwork than on your own computer.
Still, information theft is best thought of as inevitable in a digital world, and precautions should be taken with damage control in mind. There are two rules that I use to minimize damage and allow for fast repair.
1. Never use debit cards for online transactions or with remote assistants. Reversing unauthorized credit card charges, particularly with American Express, is painless and near instantaneous. Recovering funds withdrawn from your checking account via unauthorized debit card use takes dozens of hours in paperwork alone and can take months to receive, if approved at all.
2. If your VA will be accessing websites on your behalf, create a new unique login and password to be used on those sites. Most of us reuse both logins and passwords on multiple sites, and taking this precaution limits possible damage. Instruct them to use these unique logins to create accounts on new sites if needed. Note that this is particularly important when using assistants who have access to live commercial websites (developers, programmers, etc.).
If information or identity theft hasn’t hit you, it will. Use these guidelines and you’ll realize when it happens that, just like most nightmares, it’s not that big a deal and is reversible.
The Complicated Art of Simplicity:
Common Complaints
My assistant is an idiot! It took him 23 hours to book an interview! This was the first complaint I had, for sure. 23 hours! I was heated up for a shouting match. My original e-mail to this