Hiring an assistant

[Account Closed]

I want to be able to build my business faster and one of the things I realized is that I might be doing a little too much work myself. Although, I'm currently working as a part-time investor, I realized that I need to make time for my day job, my real estate investing business and time for my personal life as well. To make things go faster, I'm considering hiring an assistant to help about a few hours per week, no more than a few hours a week, in helping me find deals and with marketing my business. For all those reading this, I have a few questions:

1. When hiring the assistant you were looking for, did you interview that applicant in person? Or did you hire a virtual assistant (whom you have never met in person) and select the best candidate? If you hired a virtual assistant, where did you go to find them?

2. How are you able to touch base with them on a weekly basis to ensure that they did their due diligence, logged in their time and sent over the things that you needed from them?

3. Also, considering that I am only hiring them for just a few hours a week, I'm thinking of keeping it simple and just paying them in cash. Is that a good idea or not?

Trying to maintain my own business is still very new to me and I want to try to build my business as efficient and prosperous as possible. If you can provide me with some advice, that would be greatly appreciated. I would definitely like to learn more from all of you.

[Arlen Chou]

@Account Closed  it sounds like you are just looking for somebody to do some grunt work for you on occasion.  When you start to work with people, you need to be very careful about the employment laws in your area.  You could inadvertently have somebody as an employee that you thought was a "contractor".  Paying them cash does not protect you if they get hurt while they are running around doing things for you...

VA's are great, but that is really for online type of work. If you are looking for somebody to actually do some running around for you on occasion, I would suggest you use a service like taskrabbit. It will cost you a few extra dollars, but you will have that added corporate layer between you and the temp. They do the background checks etc, so I think you are much safer legally.

I have to throw in my disclaimer that I am not an attorney nor am I a HR specialist.  Therefore, please take my suggestions with a grain of salt, and do your own research into the labor laws of your area.

-Arlen