I Paid $420 a Month for 20 Hours of Help a Week. Here’s What I Learned Hiring My First Virtual Assistant.

There is a very specific stage of building a business where your problem stops being:

How do I get more work?

And becomes:

Oh shit. How am I supposed to do all of this work?

The emails.

The calendar.

The Instagram posts.

The DMs you definitely saw and then forgot to answer.

The research.

The website update you've moved to tomorrow's list for approximately 47 tomorrows.

And all of this is happening while you're also doing the actual thing your business exists to do.

Plus, you know. Children.

This is where I hired my first virtual assistant.

Her name was Amy. She was my first employee. And at the time I hired her, I was paying about $420 a month for 20 hours of work a week.

Which is probably why, while recording our mini episode about virtual assistants, I started seriously considering hiring her back.

Wait. What does a virtual assistant actually do?

This was one of those things I had heard people talk about before I actually understood what it meant.

A virtual assistant, or VA, is someone who works remotely and takes specific work off your plate.

And "assistant" is a pretty loose term.

You can hire someone to:

• manage your inbox

• organize your calendar

• schedule social media

• answer DMs

• research content or projects

• help build offers

• work on websites

• handle administrative tasks

• do bookkeeping

• help with customer communication

And that's still barely the list.

Jenn has used virtual assistants in her real estate investment and property management businesses since they started. They've had VAs supporting managers and even hired a specialized bookkeeper remotely.

Which is when our conversation went from virtual assistants are useful to:

Why are we still doing some of this ourselves?

Fair question.

The part nobody tells you: hiring help creates work, too

Here's what I learned pretty quickly.

You can't hire a VA, dump the contents of your brain into Slack and expect your life to magically become easier.

Unfortunately.

You are hiring an actual person.

You need to interview them like you're hiring an employee.

Look at how they communicate.

Look at their resume.

Ask for references.

Look at examples of their work if the role calls for it.

If they're going to manage social media, look at accounts they've managed.

If communication matters for the role — and it probably does — pay attention to how clearly you're communicating with each other before you hire.

Jenn and her team learned the references lesson the hard way. They hired without getting strong references first, and later realized there was probably a reason those references weren't there.

Cheap help that creates more work isn't actually cheap.

Where do you even find a virtual assistant?

We've hired or searched through places including:

Upwork

Fiverr

OnlineJobs.ph

There are also VA agencies that do some of the vetting for you.

The tradeoff is pretty straightforward.

If you're finding and vetting an independent contractor yourself, you may pay less.

If you go through an agency that has already screened candidates, checked qualifications and done some of the annoying part for you, you're probably going to pay more.

Jenn's team has done both.

They also found one of their VAs through a recommendation from another VA they already trusted.

Which, honestly, might be one of the simplest hiring strategies in the whole episode:

Ask the good person you already work with if they know another good person.

Sometimes business advice does not need a funnel.

So...what does a VA cost?

This varies. A lot.

Location matters.

Experience matters.

The job matters.

How you're hiring matters.

When I hired Amy, my arrangement worked out to about $420 per month for 20 hours of work each week.

Jenn has hired overseas VAs in roughly the $6–$8/hour range for some roles, while a more specialized bookkeeper her company hired was around $20/hour.

They've also paid more when hiring through an agency.

Those aren't universal rates or a promise of what you'll find now. They're simply what we've actually paid in our businesses.

And that's the part we're interested in talking about.

Not:

"Delegation is the key to scaling."

Okay. Cool.

Who did you hire?

Where did you find them?

What did you pay them?

What did you actually give them to do?

Much more useful.

Before you hire one, figure out what the hell they're going to do

This was probably my biggest lesson.

In my arrangement, I was paying for those hours whether I used every one of them or not.

Which meant I needed enough work to fill Amy's schedule.

That's important.

Because there's another version of this story where you get excited about getting help, hire someone for 20 hours a week and then realize you have absolutely no system for getting the work out of your head and into theirs.

Now you're paying someone while simultaneously thinking:

I don't have time to figure out what to give you.

Not ideal.

So before hiring someone, I'd do this first:

For one week, keep a running list of everything you do that doesn't actually require you.

Don't make it complicated.

Open your Notes app.

Every time you find yourself doing something repetitive, administrative or teachable, add it.

Scheduling a post.

Researching something.

Cleaning up the inbox.

Confirming an appointment.

Updating something on the website.

Organizing a spreadsheet.

Answering the same customer question again.

Then look at the list.

That's the beginning of the job description.

And this isn't only a "serious business owner" thing

This was the part of our conversation I kept coming back to.

A VA doesn't necessarily have to be managing some giant company operation.

There are people who can help organize calendars. Research things. Handle scheduling. Help manage social content. Take administrative tasks out of your day.

And if you're building something while raising kids, the bottleneck might not be your ambition or your business idea.

It might be that there are only so many hours between drop-off and pickup.

That's a much more useful problem to solve.

Because the goal isn't to become exceptionally good at doing 37 things simultaneously.

Maybe somebody else can do six of them.

If you're considering hiring a VA, start here

Don't hire someone tomorrow just because $420 sounded exciting.

Do this instead:

1. Track your tasks for one week.

Write down everything you're doing that another person could realistically learn.

2. Circle the repetitive stuff.

Those are probably your easiest first delegations.

3. Turn those tasks into an actual role.

What would this person own every week?

4. Decide how many hours of work actually exist.

Not how many hours you wish you could hand off. How many you can currently explain, assign and manage.

5. Then start looking.

Interview people.

Check references.

Review their work.

Pay attention to communication.

Treat the person like a real member of your business, because that's what you're asking them to become.

You may discover you don't need a VA yet.

Great.

Now you know.

Or you may stare at your list of 26 things you've been doing yourself and realize:

Oh.

This is why I'm tired.

Want to hear the whole conversation?

Jenn and I broke this down in a short Fine, I'll Do It mini episode — including what we've paid, where we've hired, the mistakes we've made and the things we'd actually hand off.

It's about 7 minutes.

Basically the length of one school drop-off if nobody forgot their water bottle.

Listen to the virtual assistant mini episode of Fine, I'll Do It.

And if you're looking for the practical side — the resources, systems and stuff you can actually use while you're building — that's what we're building inside The Library.