Personal outsourcing saves individuals time by taking on tasks like scheduling job interviews & more complex projects like researching statistics for cultural surveys.

Entrepreneurs around the world are excited about the benefits of personal procurement outsourcing, a new trend in international trade outsourcing.

For over 10 years, outsourcing has been the domain of huge multinational corporations like Hewlett-Packard and IBM.

Person-to-person outsourcing now enables everyday people to squeeze more tasks into their overcrowded daily schedules.

Personal Procurement Outsourcing Defined

Personal procurement outsourcing enables fee-paying clients to contract out vast lists of tedious, time-consuming tasks ranging from arranging airport pickups, calling a plumber and online tutoring to buying books or research reports at the lowest possible prices.

Personal procurement outsourcing is informally called remote executive assistance, an Internet butler service and even 24-hour virtual valets. Regardless of its label, personal procurement outsourcing makes good business sense because it frees up time thus enabling people to focus on more profitable tasks.

Evalueserve, a global research firm based in India, estimates that the personal outsourcing revenues will accelerate 26% annually from US$250 million in 2006 to surpass US$2 billion by 2015.

Described below are two Web-based specialists that provide economical, outsourced personal services.

AskSunday.com

In business for under a year, AskSunday already services about 2,000 customers mostly from the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. AskSunday organizes its business into two categories:

• Requests are short, consumer-related tasks that are carried out via phone or Internet.
• Projects are more involved personal or business-related tasks that require an on-demand, skilled team of resources.

Examples of AskSunday requests are bill dispute follow-ups, dinner reservations, doctor appointments and travel bookings. Projects range from a full-time virtual personal assistant for a franchise owner, detailed research on top-selling items on eBay by category for a PhD candidate, and a virtual sales office for a London-based software firm that can now service New York City and Chicago.

While AskSunday’s Request Team only handles submissions in English, the more detail-oriented Projects Team supports English, Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Pilipino, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil and Urdu.

AskSunday Pricing Plans

AskSunday has separate pricing plans for requests and projects. For requests, a monthly fee of US$49 per month buys 50 requests per month plus AskSunday will make international calls on an individual accountholder’s behalf.

Each project requires that clients separately negotiate deliverables, deadlines and prices with an AskSunday project manager.

Get Friday.com

Based in Bangladore, India, where the monthly wage is about US$179, GetFriday has grown its client list to 1,100 quickly. Only recently the personal services outsourcer reduced its waiting period for prospective new clients from three weeks to five days.

GetFriday has clients in Australia, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, New Zealand, Switzerland, the U.S. and the U.K. Their only prerequisite is that GetFriday accomplishes all personal and business tasks via the Internet, email, fax or telephone.

GetFriday.com presents visitors with well-organized categories. Some are shown below with sample services.

• Accounting (creating invoices, data entry, verifying bills)
• Customer Relations (contacting, correspondence, invitations)
• Home Assistance (groceries, cleaning services, taxes)
• Marketing (database management, keyword searches, web design)
• Organizational (domain registration, human resources, office purchases)
• Paralegal (case preparation, legal documents, transcription)
• Personal (diet goals, reservations, spousal relations)
• Research (charts, graphs, statistics)
• Secretarial (proofreading, receptionist, transcribing)
• Travel (car rentals, lost luggage, vacation deals).

The personal procurement outsourcer also supports custom tasks like daily phone calls to read bedtime stories to young children.

GetFriday Pricing Plans

GetFriday offers three pricing plans, which apply to both personal and business tasks.

• Pay As You Go has a monthly administrative fee of US$10 plus an hourly rate of $15.
• Monthly plans depend on the number of hours billed from 10 to 160 hours with monthly charges ranging from $120 to $1,120.
• Task-based plans are for specific, one-time projects with prices negotiated based on such factors as complexity, deadlines, required skills and resources.

One of GetFriday’s most popular testimonials is from an individual for whom the personal outsourcer had conducted a successful job search. Ironically, that individual had been downsized after a multinational corporation had outsourced his job to India.