drake30 said:
lol, what happened ?
okay. so my wife among other people is always telling me "backbreaker you need to delegate stuff more it's wearing you out" and I'm always like I don't trust people because people are lazy. I'd rather be tired and know it got done right. So after a really really tired day about a month ago I break down and say okay I'm gonna pick a task that I am going to try to delegate. What's the worst thing that can happen lol?
We get a lot of business from referrals and our website but at least 1/3rd of our work comes from freelance websites like elance.com and freelancer.com / guru.com. I put all of these sites in an RSS reader and I check it about once an hour give or take for relevant jobs that we would be interested in.
So I said you know what.. i can probably hire someone to do this. I mean, i will pay you to sit there, find tech related projects that we do and email them. There are about 1300-1500 a day between the 2 sites that come through my feed. If i could narrow that down to like, 50-60 via email that would def save me about at least an hour a day plus the stress of not having to check it.
So I found a tech guy who would know the difference between asp.net and PHP and such and I hired him to do this task. He lives on the east coast somewhere. He seemed like he knew what he was doing, i was so happy that I found someone to do this I doubled what he asked for pay wise. It was worth it to me if he did a good job and I wanted him to do a good job.
Mind you I've been doing this for what..5-6 years. I have a good idea of the amount of responses I'm supposed to see a day an almost immediately I notice that i'm not getting that number. I figured well it is probably a learning curve, I will put up with it as long as he's learning what to do as it's worth it to me. But sales are down becuase of it. We generally sale 5-6 projects a month between the three sites and we sold 1 last month. We have other stuff we're working on so it's not a huge deal but still.
So 2 days ago he tells me he is sick so I say don't worry about it man, get some rest, will handle it today. Least I could do. So I login and I know how many feeds I'm supposed to have exactly, it's been setup that way for years, and I notice I have about half of those feeds.
This dude, to save time, deleted half the feeds so he would not have to check them. Costing me thousands of dollars so he would not have to spend an additional 10 minutes a day doing work.
I was so hot my wife had to fire him. I would have beat the **** out of him.
This is why people can't find work. you're lazy. for what i paid this dude ($350 dollars a week to login to a feed once an hour and read it) an indian would have kissed my feet to do the project and would have done it right, no questions asked, however i need them done on my time zone. so I have to do it myself.
