www.ambiente.us MARCH / MARZO 2008
Your personal assistant, half a world away
By Laurie Goering
BANGALORE, India — When David Hui found himself stranded in the middle of nowhere on a broken-down
Amtrak train on the East Coast, he called for help—to his personal assistant in India.
Working over the Internet, the assistant figured out where Hui was, based on the last street signs Hui had
seen from the train, then tracked down a rental car to come pick him up. In the end, the train started moving
again before the car arrived, but Hui, 30, was no less impressed by the effort on his behalf from half a world
away.
"I've been surprised at how much personal ownership they take to make my tasks a success," said the
Cambridge, Mass.-based management consultant, who for the past year and a half has been a client of Get
Friday, a Bangalore personal and small-business services outsourcing company. "They go the extra mile for
me."
In the latest twist on globalization, it is now possible to hire a personal assistant—in India—to take care of
just about anything you don't have time to do and that can be accomplished via phone or the Internet.
Need your daughter's birthday party organized? A snowplow to clear your driveway? Your résumé and
cover letter sent out to potential employers? How about a romantic vegan dinner for two delivered to your
home, complete with live music?
A personal assistant working from a cubicle in Bangalore or Hyderabad now can arrange all that and a
whole lot more, and not just for the long-pampered uber-rich but for a much bigger market: America's
exhausted middle class.
"Anything that's illegal or in bad taste we will not do. Other than that, bring it on," said T.T. Venkatash, a
senior manager for Get Friday.
Personal and small-business services are the latest wave of outsourcing to India and one that is rapidly
picking up speed, despite concerns about the wisdom of relying so much on overseas service providers. .
Today, a handful of Indian start-up companies in the personal and small-business services field are
handling $200 million worth of calls for help from overwhelmed firms and harried individuals worldwide,
said P. Sunder, chief executive of TTK Services, the parent company of Get Friday. By 2015, industry income
should hit $2 billion, predicts Evalueserve, an outsourcing research and consulting company.
Doing the busy work
Each outsourcing firm has its own specialty. One, called TutorVista, focuses on linking Indian tutors with
students in the U.S. and elsewhere. Another, Ask Sunday, handles personal tasks for as little as $29 a
month, plus larger project work.
The companies have a similar goal: helping clients, most of them in the United States, wade through an
ever-deepening sea of mundane chores without overtaxing their pocketbooks or their sanity.
"People on the way to O'Hare [airport] shoot us requests on their Blackberries, asking us to check their flight
status," said Avinash Samudrala, a St. Louis native who co-founded Ask Sunday last year. "It's pretty
amazing if you think about it."
Get Friday, launched in 2005, started with just one desk, a handful of employees and fewer than 100
customers. Today it has 200 cubicles, spread over several floors of a dusty, non-descript commercial
building on Bangalore's outskirts, 140 employees and 1,200 clients, 95 percent of them in the United States.
During a recent night shift—the busiest hours thanks to the average 12-hour time difference from the
United States—young women in colorful saris and young men in button-down shirts crouched over
computer keyboards, sipping milky Indian tea and working on problems a world away.
One organized a program for a dance competition; another updated a Web site for a client preparing for a
Professional Golf Association merchandising show in Orlando. One woman researched the fiber content in
dog food while another sent her boss a daily inspirational quote, per his request.
Others have devised complicated wake-up call systems to rout the terminally sleepy from bed, battled with
airlines over lost luggage or developed diet plans for the hefty, even arranging to have groceries delivered
lest their clients weaken in the Oreo aisle. After Hurricane Katrina, the company managed to track down the
missing relative of one client by trolling through government Web sites listing the displaced, company
officials said.
"It's really fun. Each day we experience new things," said Sahnaz,21, the shift's best technical writerwho, like
many southern Indians, uses only one name—as she churned out an article on "How to Be Your Own
Construction Contractor."
No term papers, please
What the assistants can do is limited mainly by the imagination of their bosses. Hui, after persuading his
Indian assistant to sing a song over the phone to a delighted friend, created his own serenade outsourcing
company, TajTunes, with the assistant's help.
Another client, a frustrated U.S. diplomat in Pakistan, had the company track down someone who could
explain to her Urdu-speaking maid how to properly feed the cat.
The companies occasionally have to draw the line. Get Friday turned down a New Zealand man's request to
create a database of all the escort services in that country. Then there was the student who wanted his
assistant to "read the following essay, answer the following question in tightly written, double-spaced text,
and get it back by Monday," Venkatash remembers. "We said no."
At Get Friday, each client is assigned a personal assistant, but behind the scenes a larger team—which
includes Web site designers, teachers and accountants, among others—often collaborates on jobs.
Company officials say the team approach offers clients an advantage over hiring a personal assistant at
home, who, besides costing four times as much, might be skilled at answering phones but not managing
books, or a whiz at party planning but unable to put tax receipts in a spreadsheet.
"With a full-time admin, I have to supervise them and, if there's a lull in their work activity, 'find' work to keep
them busy," said Richard Hawksworth, who runs a small media production company in Chicago and signed
up with Get Friday six months ago after his previous personal assistant moved out of state.
Now, "I call when I need something, and I pay for the work they provide—no stress or anxiety about
unproductive time or employees." For somebody who is "spread very thin," he says, "that's huge."
Venkatash insists his company isn't stealing U.S. jobs, the usual criticism of outsourcing, though party
planners and database management companies would probably disagree.
In most cases, "It's not like our clients had an assistant, then they gave us the work because it was
cheaper," Venkatash said. "They're your average Joe, plumbers and teachers, small businessmen who
could never afford to hire someone."
For them, "there's nothing else like this," he said.
Copyright © Chicago Tribune & AMBIENTE MAGAZINE. Do not reproduce without citing these sources.
Your personal assistant, half a world away
By Laurie Goering
BANGALORE, India — When David Hui found himself stranded in the middle of nowhere on a broken-down
Amtrak train on the East Coast, he called for help—to his personal assistant in India.
Working over the Internet, the assistant figured out where Hui was, based on the last street signs Hui had
seen from the train, then tracked down a rental car to come pick him up. In the end, the train started moving
again before the car arrived, but Hui, 30, was no less impressed by the effort on his behalf from half a world
away.
"I've been surprised at how much personal ownership they take to make my tasks a success," said the
Cambridge, Mass.-based management consultant, who for the past year and a half has been a client of Get
Friday, a Bangalore personal and small-business services outsourcing company. "They go the extra mile for
me."
In the latest twist on globalization, it is now possible to hire a personal assistant—in India—to take care of
just about anything you don't have time to do and that can be accomplished via phone or the Internet.
Need your daughter's birthday party organized? A snowplow to clear your driveway? Your résumé and
cover letter sent out to potential employers? How about a romantic vegan dinner for two delivered to your
home, complete with live music?
A personal assistant working from a cubicle in Bangalore or Hyderabad now can arrange all that and a
whole lot more, and not just for the long-pampered uber-rich but for a much bigger market: America's
exhausted middle class.
"Anything that's illegal or in bad taste we will not do. Other than that, bring it on," said T.T. Venkatash, a
senior manager for Get Friday.
Personal and small-business services are the latest wave of outsourcing to India and one that is rapidly
picking up speed, despite concerns about the wisdom of relying so much on overseas service providers. .
Today, a handful of Indian start-up companies in the personal and small-business services field are
handling $200 million worth of calls for help from overwhelmed firms and harried individuals worldwide,
said P. Sunder, chief executive of TTK Services, the parent company of Get Friday. By 2015, industry income
should hit $2 billion, predicts Evalueserve, an outsourcing research and consulting company.
Doing the busy work
Each outsourcing firm has its own specialty. One, called TutorVista, focuses on linking Indian tutors with
students in the U.S. and elsewhere. Another, Ask Sunday, handles personal tasks for as little as $29 a
month, plus larger project work.
The companies have a similar goal: helping clients, most of them in the United States, wade through an
ever-deepening sea of mundane chores without overtaxing their pocketbooks or their sanity.
"People on the way to O'Hare [airport] shoot us requests on their Blackberries, asking us to check their flight
status," said Avinash Samudrala, a St. Louis native who co-founded Ask Sunday last year. "It's pretty
amazing if you think about it."
Get Friday, launched in 2005, started with just one desk, a handful of employees and fewer than 100
customers. Today it has 200 cubicles, spread over several floors of a dusty, non-descript commercial
building on Bangalore's outskirts, 140 employees and 1,200 clients, 95 percent of them in the United States.
During a recent night shift—the busiest hours thanks to the average 12-hour time difference from the
United States—young women in colorful saris and young men in button-down shirts crouched over
computer keyboards, sipping milky Indian tea and working on problems a world away.
One organized a program for a dance competition; another updated a Web site for a client preparing for a
Professional Golf Association merchandising show in Orlando. One woman researched the fiber content in
dog food while another sent her boss a daily inspirational quote, per his request.
Others have devised complicated wake-up call systems to rout the terminally sleepy from bed, battled with
airlines over lost luggage or developed diet plans for the hefty, even arranging to have groceries delivered
lest their clients weaken in the Oreo aisle. After Hurricane Katrina, the company managed to track down the
missing relative of one client by trolling through government Web sites listing the displaced, company
officials said.
"It's really fun. Each day we experience new things," said Sahnaz,21, the shift's best technical writerwho, like
many southern Indians, uses only one name—as she churned out an article on "How to Be Your Own
Construction Contractor."
No term papers, please
What the assistants can do is limited mainly by the imagination of their bosses. Hui, after persuading his
Indian assistant to sing a song over the phone to a delighted friend, created his own serenade outsourcing
company, TajTunes, with the assistant's help.
Another client, a frustrated U.S. diplomat in Pakistan, had the company track down someone who could
explain to her Urdu-speaking maid how to properly feed the cat.
The companies occasionally have to draw the line. Get Friday turned down a New Zealand man's request to
create a database of all the escort services in that country. Then there was the student who wanted his
assistant to "read the following essay, answer the following question in tightly written, double-spaced text,
and get it back by Monday," Venkatash remembers. "We said no."
At Get Friday, each client is assigned a personal assistant, but behind the scenes a larger team—which
includes Web site designers, teachers and accountants, among others—often collaborates on jobs.
Company officials say the team approach offers clients an advantage over hiring a personal assistant at
home, who, besides costing four times as much, might be skilled at answering phones but not managing
books, or a whiz at party planning but unable to put tax receipts in a spreadsheet.
"With a full-time admin, I have to supervise them and, if there's a lull in their work activity, 'find' work to keep
them busy," said Richard Hawksworth, who runs a small media production company in Chicago and signed
up with Get Friday six months ago after his previous personal assistant moved out of state.
Now, "I call when I need something, and I pay for the work they provide—no stress or anxiety about
unproductive time or employees." For somebody who is "spread very thin," he says, "that's huge."
Venkatash insists his company isn't stealing U.S. jobs, the usual criticism of outsourcing, though party
planners and database management companies would probably disagree.
In most cases, "It's not like our clients had an assistant, then they gave us the work because it was
cheaper," Venkatash said. "They're your average Joe, plumbers and teachers, small businessmen who
could never afford to hire someone."
For them, "there's nothing else like this," he said.
Copyright © Chicago Tribune & AMBIENTE MAGAZINE. Do not reproduce without citing these sources.
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