Update: after some research, I decided to post a job to Upwork to find some help. I didn’t want to ignore potential solutions so I didn’t ask for help with Confluence, but anything that could fit the bill. Here’s how I worded it:

I’m looking for someone who is an expert using Confluence/Basecamp/Sharepoint/etc to help me find a way improve our current system of sharing with Dropbox Word/Excel system. We would like an easy to use “thing” to manage all of our projects/contracts, policies, procedures, forms, etc. Something like a searchable, editable, “hub” of information for our company.

Here’s a link to my full post (which is now closed): https://www.upwork.com/jobs/~011dbc031e9e2bd4f3

I engaged with a VA named Michael from Texas who has a crazy amount of Confluence experience has an Upwork rating 100% (https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/users/_~01795f8003dc0ebd38). Prior learning experience has taught me to be wary of overseas help for “culture-based” jobs that require intuitive soft skills. I had a phone meeting with Michael and he backed up his experience with some awesome insights on how Confluence could be used (he kind of blew my mind) and told me he had set up the same thing I’m looking for recently for a large construction company in the US. I decided to look past the high hourly rate ($105/hr) and give Michael a chance.

It’s a lot of money. My thought is to use Michael to set up the architecture of the Confluence system, teach me more about it and then hire a lower cost VA to actually transfer the bulk of my OHS, policies, and procedures over into the Precision wiki. I *kind* of hope Michael has a rapid import trick or two up his sleeve to make this much more efficient than manually importing Word and Excel files into Confluence. This is one of those situations where it’s really easy to get tempted by that $16/hr VA that will take 100 hours to do something a $105/hr VA could do in 4 hours. I’ll keep my eyes on it and see what happens.