How I search for professional assistance
Increasingly often as the scope of my plans and projects and life increases, I need to hire professional assistance of some sort. My life is unusual in a lot of ways, involving a lot of niche situations and edge cases that vanishingly few people will ever encounter. That bleeds over into those requests for assistance, such that my requests are also niche and uncommon, or even unheard of in those professional circles. And, of course, these things are uncommon enough that the few pros that can handle the request don't advertise having such weird specialty abilities. I frequently find myself needing to talk to dozens to hundreds of people in a particular field just to find a referral to one of the few I am looking for.
A few examples might make this concept more clear. Very few mortgage lenders are willing to lend on 25 acre properties with multiple residential buildings. Very few plumbers are comfortable and qualified to work on a sewer (i.e. climbing underground through manhole covers). No shipping container transport company in New England has ever heard of, let alone has, a side loader trailer. Very few real estate attorneys in Massachusetts do any litigation, and almost none of the real estate litigators are interested in cases complex enough to involve criminal charges. Very few family law attorneys in California are willing to advise on a prenuptial agreement without revising it. Very few mental healthcare partial hospitalization programs offer supervised meal times. Almost none of the “very few” above advertise the feature in question, and so...
Over time, I have developed a workflow that helps me keep track of my efforts when I am searching for anything like that. I'm going to describe that workflow here, with two main goals. First, I want to help other people who need to do similar things, especially after a few people have asked me to shepherd their first use of my process. Second, I want suggestions for where you see gaps in this plan and how I could fill them.
I start with a new folder (usually on Google Drive, but this also works on a local filesystem or OneDrive or whatever) containing two files, a text document and a spreadsheet. The folder goes wherever other efforts on the same project go (e.g. a higher level folder for a project or purchase or case), and gets named for the effort and some part of the date depending on the scope of the effort (I don't record the day if I'll be searching all week or month, or the month if I'll be searching all year).
The spreadsheet starts with one page/sheet/tab. That sheet has the following columns: * Business or personal name I am contacting * Phone number * Email address * Website * Who referred me * Date added to the sheet / Date of first contact attempt * Project-specific columns, e.g. * quoted price * hours of operation * professional license number * distance to the site of the project * Status is broken down into many options depending on the project, but those options come in three main flavors: * Red – This row is done, don't contact them again. Could be a wrong number, an outright rejection, or a choice to avoid them. * Yellow – This row is worth contacting again. Maybe I left a voicemail, or they said they would be less busy next week. * Green – I am actively engaged with this row. I need to contact them or do something else or wait for some in-progress effort to proceed. * Notes/Misc – anything specific to this entry that doesn't fit elsewhere on the sheet. * Contact – notes of when I called or emailed, who I talked to, what I asked, what they said.
When the contact efforts or notes for a single row on the sheet become unwieldy, which can happen after a single long call with multiple people or multiple short calls, and if I think the contact is worth continuing to pursue, then they get promoted to having their own new sheet. The business details and status continue to be updated in the main sheet, but this new sheet has the following columns: * Date of contact or note * Method of contact (email, phone, etc) * Person I spoke to * Summary of the conversation
The text document is where I keep general notes about the process, links to sources of information, and a record of what steps I took to populate the spreadsheet. I record search terms or dates that I used, web directories where I found contact information, and how far I got in each of those result sets. This enables me to go back later and pick up with, e.g., page 5 of the directory if none of the leads from the first four pages panned out. I may also keep longer informational sections about the green leads in the spreadsheet, such as relevant excerpts from emails and contracts, and links to the original sources for those.
I will set aside 1-8 hours to make progress on a particular search. In that time I will go through the spreadsheet and follow up on green rows if needed, then yellow rows if it seems reasonable, then add more rows if there are further searches to be done or directories to scrape. Rinse and repeat until I find help or give up. That's really the whole process, although there are small tweaks depending on the nature of the project and professional help I'm looking to hire. Next I'll describe some of the places I see room for improvement.
My current workflow for turning a web page directory of professional contacts into a spreadsheet involves copying and pasting the website content into a text document then doing some regex search and replace to reduce it to a TSV of the relevant information, then importing that into the sheet. I've tried to use existing or vibe coded web scraping tools to speed this up, but due to the unlimited variety of web site layouts that has always taken longer for weaker results.
I have never found a good app for using my computer to initiate calls on my phone. Sometimes I'll use Google Voice from my computer, but it's usually more productive to manually type the phone number into the phone. This is an area I'd like to improve. If I could make a few clicks from the spreadsheet to have a call on my phone, that would save me about an hour per year.
I have considered moving to a more database-like platform in order to have better relationships between rows/entries and sheets/tables, but so far all of the ones I have considered would be much more work to use and/or much more proprietary and difficult to extract my data from. I'd love some suggestions on other tools or platforms I might use to arrange the information.