We’ve just had the most awesome couple of days in terms of staff and something one of our staff told me today thrilled me to the core. We’ve now got 26 part-time staff based around the country that we work with, some we work with a lot, others not so much. We’ve become pretty good at training them to do the compartmentalised, production line type tasks we need doing and while we value them highly individually they are mostly quite interchangeable, because that’s the way we intended things to be. A couple of days ago we needed some help in a hurry. I put the word out with my guys and they came up with someone. They have checked his skills, taught him our procedures and trained him very well. I have not yet met this person!

Because I trust the judgement of my staff (almost all are from within networks, a few from online job ads.) and have built solid, simple procedures we’re able to do stunning things like this. I can’t wait to see what’s next (I’m also looking forward to meeting the newest member of the team!)

Sorry to hear about your experience with the virtual assistant. I have never hired one. The closest I came was hiring a company in India to do a small amount of Craigslist marketing for us, and that didn’t go very well. I do hope to outsource more mundane tasks in the future because you can get so much for your money, but as you pointed out there are trade-offs.

I guess I’d just take a similar approach – try to find a referral to a company that people have had success with and start by giving them a few small test projects. Also, read 4 Hour Work Week if you haven’t. Tim Ferriss breaks down in quite a bit of detail what worked for him and what didn’t.

Adam

Great points about the hiring process. I’m curious as to whether you’ve ever hired a “virtual” employee, like a programmer or virtual assistant. I hired a virtual assistant last year, and it was a total disaster. I had to chase her down to get updates on assignments and she dragged things out so she could bill me for more time. It was more work for me to chase after her than it would have been for me to just do the work myself. I’m wondering if there’s a good process for evaluating people for virtual positions.

I cannot stress the importance of developing a network, it takes very little effort to maintain and can yield unbelievable results. I learned a trick from a great salesman I used to deal with, he passed away a few years ago and one way I like to maintain his legacy is to share one of the tricks he shared with me about how he was so good at what he did. Bare in mind this was about 15 years ago, he kept index cards in his car about everyone he talked to, names, interests, things they mentioned, any detail about the individual he thought was worth noting and he would review the appropriate index cards before he stopped at any account. He was enormously successful and made it look effortless, despite him passing away roughly 7 years ago I still have fond memories of how he created a highly organized system that resembles the internet only with paper and a pen. He was never at a loss of finding the right people for the right task, his cards were very organized and easy to interpret.

In other words, as I ALWAYS preach, one of the primary pillars of successful business: People deal with people.

I’m not 100% sure how my partners would answer, but I do think they mostly agree with me. I think they definitely agree with me on the priorities of hiring. Right now we’re all just entrenched in too much day to day crap and I think that any successful business owner wants to remove themselves from all of the work that they don’t have to do.

Programming wise, there’s only probably a year left of real important improvements to make. After that, the core e-commerce stuff doesn’t require full time attention. I think with a few new major features a year and we’ll be able to stay ahead of the competition. That leaves me with maybe 60% of my time to work on other stuff.

I think we all agree that we don’t have the resources (time & money) to enter into another retail venture any time soon. So logically I think we’ll morph a little more into a web company. Then again, I think that’s really speculating at this point because it’s 1 year+ away. A lot can change in that time.

As far as your second question, I think I would try to eliminate chargeback fraud. I’d try to build a network of retailers who paid a fee to access an API to check if a customer has previously done something fraudulent on another website. It would be a huge undertaking – you’d need programmers to build plugins for all of the major shopping carts, you’d need a massive amount of retailers to buy into the system to make it work, and you’d need a way to categorize each fraud correctly so that one minor miscommunication wouldn’t blacklist a customer for life. It’d be a big challenge with a lot of things to overcome, but it’s something I have experience in and am passionate about, plus it’s improving the web for everyone.

Can I try another one? If you were going to introduce one big risky project with a chance of being a huge success but a bigger chance of being a substantial failure, what kind of things would you consider?

Sorry to psychoanalyse.