My friend David Eaves mused a while ago about a business/service model that only struck me now as a source for some huge growth. He described the concept as a “timeshare secretary”. Essentially, it’s a remote executive assistant. This person would be shared amongst four or five different people who pay into the services available. The XA/Secretary would receive all the pertinent information and compile it into a centralized dashboard.

This, I think is the PERFECT job for stay-at-home parents. The key here would be develop software tools that automate a great deal of their tasks and make it easy to juggle the schedules of multiple agents who are all over the field - thankfully a few organizations that specialize in this kind of thing.

So, the obvious business venture would be to create a marketplace for secretaries and agents and then do a co-operative buy-in system. The easiest way to do it, I think, would be for secretaries to establish a salary expectation, the maximum number of clients they’ll accept, and the time commitment they can make. Agents can post a job expectation description with the amount they’ll be willing to pay, any bonuses they can offer. Agents are clustered in batches and any combination that fulfills an XA’s profile notifies that XA and the appropriate agents of the match. Agents can also make bids on XAs directly in an auction format - only the number of winners is the cluster of agents who buy-in to the XA.

The system could handle things for XAs like maximizing revenue potential and filtering out postings that preclude them etc.

The key sticking points would be privacy issues, competition issues and other complications when you’re dealing with potential conflict of interest on the XA and the Agent. That said, the business venture would have to vet XAs pretty extensively before they get on the system - it wouldn’t be a free-for-all like Monster.ca

There aren’t a great deal of software tool requirements - a rollable CMS to handle scheduling, contact management and the like. Telephone routing and procurement would be the key sticking points. VOIP plans can handle the call center - style phone routing. As for purchase handling, it may not be a service we could support in the system directly.

The main benefit is for people who aren’t executives (with accompanying salaries) who have a demand for secretarial work, but not of a sufficient volume to warrant full-time employment. This system would allow such agents to find others like themselves AND find workers who specialize in this kind of professional service.

The primary profit centers would be manifold - firstly, there would be a brokerage fee for successfully transacting people. Agents would likely have some sort of pay model to have access to the system. The infrastructure would have some sort of pay model - again shouldered by the Agents. Finally, and perhaps the biggest, it would provide a gateway to larger-scale professional services firms like KPMG, H&R Block etc. Who could sign agreements with the venture to be our preferred suppliers of upstream professional services (handled by the XAs)

XAs would be stay-at-home mums or particularly vital retirees, students and young technically savvy young people. Responsible highschool students would make perfect XAs. Probably the most under-utilized sector of the populace could be working at this kind of thing.

Obviously there are very significant legal issues surrounding this concept but I don’t think they are at direct odds with the basic model…

Posted by Jeremy on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 1:40 pm.