Well, you see, part of the problem is that you want someone local to you, and I'm not. There seems to be a lot of this sort of stuff (well, more in factories than as small contract jobs) going on 50-150 miles away from me, and squat doodle here. Even 50 miles (which is not exactly a thriving subset) is both a pain in the rear and an expense which makes seeking that business less than appealing. Get rid of the ones that want to pay $10 an hour and there's even less to be found. I've tried one of the "contract job" systems which seemed somewhat less scam-like than most, but have yet to see much appropriate from it (plenty of folks willing to pay $250 for you to do their college projects for them, though - how exciting...)
You're more like 3000 miles away, though FedEx could make that pretty close for some versions of "close". I'm quite a bit closer (~3 hours drive) to Phil, but might not really be at the scale he wants, if he's looking for super-teeny parts on a pick-and-place basis. If part sizes are reasonable and he's (in part) looking for "not Phil" hand labor in the northeast, I might be able to help him out. I'm limited at present to only if the projects are indeed of reasonable size or can have spread-out delivery over time, since I'm only looking for side/moonlighting work unless I develop a history of enough side/moonlighting work to make pitching the day job (health insurance, steady income, etc.) reasonable - I've not seen a huge amount of indication that this is terribly reasonable to expect here - and I'm not looking to move, nor do I at present have a list of clients being me to find time to work on their projects. Still, 20 units of 150 parts reach is not unreasonable if the turn-time is not so tight that "nights and weekends" won't do and the parts can actually be held and soldered. Repeat a few times and I might even grow an oven and a nitrogen atmosphere for it. How's carbon dioxide for soldering? I could brew up some beer and pipe the gas through an oven, I guess. I already grew a hot air rework station...
Also, let's face it, I'm an enginerd, not a salsedroid. That's been clear since the days of "sell crap items to raise money for " at school. I haven't taken up advertising because as soon as I think about advertising I think about how to write the advertisement to fend off the sort of business I don't want to spend time having to fend off - the lazy idiot college projects, the consumer electronics repair, etc. That makes me consider the intangible costs of doing business that way, and I put off trying to recruit business that mostly does not appear to exist around here. To be worth doing, it has to be adequately satisfying and renumerative to offset the loss of time that I could enjoyably spend doing other things. So if the guy who will work for $10 an hour suits you, I'm not going to fight him for the work.