You know you need an assistant, but where do you even start?

When your business is growing fast, your day-to-day operations can take up too much space in your brain. 

It’s hard to find time to think about the big picture because you spend too much time doing admin and operational tasks – managing your email, keeping your schedule, processing orders, updating your website, and other routine tasks that could be handed over to someone else. It’s not enough work to bring on an employee, so a virtual assistant (VA) is a good option. But how do you find one? And what exactly do you need them to do?

One option is to use an agency – they take care of recruiting, hiring, paying and supervising a virtual assistant (VA) for you. If the VA doesn’t work out, they’ll find you another one. This costs you more than what you’d pay for a freelancer, but you benefit from the work the agency does to recruit and supervise your VA. 

Another option is to find a freelancer to work with directly. You save money but you take the risk of wasting a lot of time trying to find the right person.

How do you decide? Here is a quick analysis of three important considerations: time, money and communications.

Time

One big benefit of agencies is that they can save you time by providing some training and oversight for your VAs. But they don’t know your business nearly as well as you do, so you’ll still have to put some time in, both training them and monitoring them on an ongoing basis. 

The amount of time depends on how clearly you have defined what you need them to do. If your tasks, goals and expectations are straightforward, it’s easy for a qualified VA to step into the role. 

However, if you’re not sure exactly what you will ask them to do, the agency and VA are not well equipped to help you. They are experts at office admin generally, but they don’t know your business well enough to understand your specific needs. You may luck out and get a great agency VA, who understands your challenges well enough to develop solutions. (But if they’re that great, there is always the risk they will leave you to find freelance work that is better paid.)

On the other hand, a freelancer has a relationship and a contract with you directly, so they are in a better position to develop an understanding of your business over a longer term. 

You will almost definitely put more time into recruiting, training and supervising a freelance VA than you would with an agency. However, this requirement will ease off as they settle in and they learn the ropes. In the long run you will both get more value from the relationship, as there will not be an agency to take a cut from each of you for every single hour of work.

Money

Clients and VAs both pay a premium for using an agency. The following numbers are imaginary (based on my many years of working for and with agencies), but demonstrate the point :

	Employer cost per hour	VA rate per hour
Freelance	$25	$25
Agency	$30	$20

The benefit for VAs of working for an agency at a lower rate is that the agency supports flexible work by finding short-term clients, and paying regularly. On the other hand, freelancers have to find their own clients, and handle their own payroll directly.

So what do you, the client, get for this extra $5/hour you pay the agency, that you wouldn’t pay a freelancer? You get a reliable and experienced team finding you a steady supply of experienced candidates for this position, managing some details of supervising them, and handling your payroll. But you’re going to keep paying that extra $5/hour for the life of the contract – and if you want to hire the VA as a regular contractor or employee, it will cost you even more.

Communication

Agencies can save you a lot of time by recruiting and overseeing your VA. However, this comes at the cost of communication.

The process of recruitment allows you to get to know the job candidates a bit better, and once you’ve hired someone, they already have a rapport with you and your business from their very first day.

With an agency, you miss this opportunity for your business and your VA to get to know each other. After they’re on board, any communication that goes through the agency is subject to the broken telephone effect: what you tell the agency may not be exactly what the VA hears, and vice versa.

So what next?

So after all this, how do you decide between an agency and a freelancer?

Do you know exactly what you need a VA to do for you, and you have the money to pay for an experienced team to handle it for you? There are agencies of all sizes to help you and I encourage you to check them out.

But if you don’t know exactly what to ask a VA to do, and you want a team member that can help you identify your needs and streamline your operations to support your longer term goals,, it’s worthwhile to put the time in to find the right freelancer. 

If you’d like to chat more about this, I’d be interested in helping you figure out how a freelancer like me can help you get out of the weeds.