DRMacIver's Notebook
Help is easy to find these days
Help is easy to find these days
I’ve previously written Getting to know the right people about how it’s very hard to find quality tradespeople and the best way to do it is through networking from existing quality tradespeople, but there’s a bootstrapping problem of how you find the original ones. I’ve now figured out the solution to this problem and it’s sortof embarrassingly easy.
It’s this: You find your local Facebook groupYou almost certainly have a local Facebook group. I live in a small town and there’s a 20k strong group for it and a few neighbouring towns. Looking at the last two places I lived in London I also find such groups and ask there whether anyone can recommend someone to do this. This will give you a mix of potential candidates responding to you directly and recommendations from people who have had good experiences. The latter aren’t necessarily trustworthy, but they’re still a decent positive signal.
I wrote about this a bit in the post on developing capacities, but I’m taking advantage of it again right now and it felt like it was worth its own post, where I used the group to find a PA.
The PA in question unfortunately hasn’t really worked out, which is representative of the problem in the original “getting to know the right people” post. The title of this post is help is easy to find these days, but that doesn’t mean good help is. You still have to find reliable people. But with the PA not having worked out, I’ll just be going back to the original post and looking through the 5-10 other responses. There are plenty of candidates, some of whom are vouched for, and it’s easy enough to try them out.
I’ll have to find a different trial task though, because now that I’ve got this approach just finding us a cleaner is a bit too easy of a task. I’ve replied to a cleaner who got in touch regarding our initial PA posting (I mentioned this as an example task there) and they’re coming by on Thursday.Or possibly they’ll come by on Thursday, be a disaster, and we’ll have this task live again. Who knows?
But for me this is a much easier approach than previously where I was using Google, because there I have to search, then I have to contact them, and so on. Cold contacting is the worst, and also it tends to result in a very rate of non or negative answers. e.g. when I last looked for cleaners I did try contacting a couple and none of them had availability. In contrast, asking for people on the Facebook group heavily selects for people who have availability, and more importantly they will come to you for you to respond to, which is much easier.
I think it particularly helps to start this with lots of easy problems, because then you end up building up a network of people early on before you really need it. e.g. A cleaner or a PA are much lower risk things to try out than a plumber, because when they get things wrong it doesn’t generally flood your house.