Virtual Assistant Pros and Cons: Is Hiring a VA Right for Your Business?

Managing a growing business entails managing dozens of competing operational demands every day. Leadership teams can easily become mired in administrative activities such as engaging with clients, organizing schedules, managing digital channels and delivering key products or services. Companies who need scalable help have found a feasible remote workforce solution in virtual assistants.

A virtual assistant may take those repetitive time consuming activities off your hands freeing up hours of your week. But employing remote support is not magic, and it has its own learning curve from working through onboarding hitches to keeping on the same page across different time zones. It is not that virtual assistants are good in theory. The actual question is, is a virtual assistant the correct fit for the specific work that you need done in your organization right now?

This book walks you through the true pros and downsides of hiring remote support so you can make the best decision for your business.

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What Is A Virtual Assistant

A virtual assistant is essentially a self-employed contractor or a devoted member of your remote team who assists you with administrative, creative or technical work from outside your physical office. A VA doesn’t sit in a cubicle down the hall—they operate out of their own home office or a local co-working place. You’ll get contacted by email, chat apps, video calls and task management boards.

How you deal with a VA is totally dependent on your business demands. You could employ one person to work a few hours a week to take care of one irritating duty, or you could create a whole remote staff to take care of entire departments. There are two general approaches to finding a VA:

• Direct Hire: Post a job listing, go through applications personally, interview your top applicants, and handle the contracts and payments directly.
• Agency Support: You get paired with a virtual assistant agency who handles all the sourcing, background checks, skills testing and admin setup for you.

The pool of remote expertise is so large that virtual assistants can fit into almost every part of your organization. Some of the most popular roles are:

• Administrative Support: Calendar management, trip arrangements, inbox organization, meeting scheduling.
• Client Support: Handling client emails, live chats on your site, answering inquiries, and managing support tickets.
• Social Media Management: Post scheduling, graphic creation, caption writing, engaging in comments.
• Lead Generation: Online research, prospect spreadsheets, contact details, basic outreach.
• Ecommerce Support: Uploading new items, writing product detail, maintaining inventory numbers correct, tracking client shipments.
• Bookkeeping Support: Prepare customer invoices, file receipts, track spending and basic data input.
• Marketing Support: Formatting email blasts, posting blog entries, and tracking performance of your recent campaigns.

Benefits of Using a Virtual Assistant

Adding a virtual assistant to your team can really improve the feel of your day at work. These are just a few of the tremendous benefits that you will notice right away.

Pro #1: Reduced Overhead

Local full-time employees also aren’t cheap — and they cost a whole lot more than their hourly compensation or annual income. If you hire in person you need to acquire extra computers, rent larger office spaces, install furniture, supply health insurance, pay payroll taxes and pay for recruiting.

So by hiring a virtual assistant, you effectively cut out or reduce on all those unnecessary charges. VAs are equipped with their own computer, secure internet connections and workplace arrangements to save you thousands of dollars up front.

Actionable Tip: Whenever considering your hiring budget, always evaluate the Total Cost of Employment for an in-house hire vs a contractor rate. Traditional hiring often add 20% to 40% on paper to their base wage when benefits, taxes and office equipment are taken into account.

Pro #2: Flexible Staffing

If you have a full time contract you are locked in as a set payroll cost whether business is flourishing or in a lull. Virtual assistants give you the breathing room. You can hire someone for 10 or 20 hours a week, and increase hours when you’re busy and decrease hours when things slow down.

Pro #3: International Talent Pool

By just recruiting folks within driving distance of your office you are drastically narrowing your skill pool. Remote support offers access to experienced professionals all over the world. You can find people with specific experience that could be super rare, or way too expensive to find easily in your local city.

Pro #4: More Time for Business Owners

Many business owners spend their time on low level admin tasks instead of building the business. No more juggling several calendars for meetings, no more hassle with clogged email inboxes, no more keeping client databases, no more web research, no more responding basic customer concerns, and no more creating weekly business reports. Let your virtual assistant do the boring stuff for you.

Eliminate those repetitive processes and you free up your calendar to put your efforts back into strategic planning, closing new sales, talking to key clients and generating real growth.

Pro #5: Simple to Delegate Repetitive tasks

Every firm has some predictable, routine chores that must be accomplished: preparing blog posts, managing raw data, updating weekly spreadsheets, or sending routine follow-up emails. These jobs are great to delegate to someone else.

Actionable Tip: Spend a week logging what you do every 30 minutes. Look for any task you are doing more than twice a week. If you can provide simple rules for how to accomplish it, you can train a VA to do it easily.

Pro #6: Awareness

Instead than trying to find a local employee who can do graphic design, search engine optimization, copy writing and bookkeeping all at the same time, you can hire specialist VAs to do each of these tasks. Hiring specialist labor means you can get much better quality of work for much less than the expense of a full time exec salary.

Pro #7: You Can Work Remotely

To manage your business with online helpers, you don’t have to acquire more desks or hire commercial office space. And since your staff members are in different time zones, your business may respond to consumer questions late at nite or early in the morning without you needing to remain up late.

Pro #8: Easy to Grow

Traditional hiring may really kill momentum, and trying to grow your company through traditional hiring can utterly kill your momentum. VAs Scale Bit by Bit Add a couple hours, employ a second assistant, or bring in a tech specialist as soon as your workload demands it.

Disadvantages of Hiring a Virtual Assistant

The rewards are huge but dealing with remote contractors isn’t always straightforward. Being aware of the typical dangers will help you develop the right strategies to avoid them.

Con #1: Communication Difficulties

If you’re working remotely you can’t just reach over and ask your desk partner a quick question. Time zone disparities, delayed reply times, misunderstood text messages and lack of company background can easily slow down your projects without prior planning.

Solution: Make your chat and update tools easy and straightforward. You could use Slack or Loom. Establish explicit ground rules from the outset on expected working hours, reaction times and speedy end-of-day check-ins.

Con #2: It takes time to train

Even if a candidate has a killer résumé, they won’t instantaneously know your brand voice, software tools, client base or personal preferences. You can’t expect someone to be flawless from day one, no guidance, it is only going to lead to frustration.

Solution: Write easy, step-by-step directions for your essential tasks. Record your screen while doing the task, make fast visual checklists and share samples of your past work for your VA to refer to.

Con #3: Quality varies

The global pool of remote staff is huge and the skill levels, work patterns, eye for detail and technical skills vary greatly. You may be a good interviewer but you could find the daily grind difficult to take.

Solution: Always do a brief practical skills exam (paid of course) before you make your final recruiting decision. Set easy performance targets, start with a 30 day probationary period and generate real recommendations.

Con #4: Reduced Supervision

If you’re used to managing individuals in person, remote work is a bit of an adjustment. You don’t get to see someone at their desk and this can make some business owners question if their assistant is actually being productive.

Solution: Stop thinking about how many seconds someone spends at their computer and start caring about what they actually produce. Judge the judges by what really matters: Were the emails answered? Are the spread sheets correct? Did the project meet its deadlines?

Con #5: Access and security issues

To do their job well, a virtual assistant will likely need access to your business email, social accounts, customer databases and software platforms. Your valuable business data could be at risk due to careless sharing of passwords.

Solution: Use a password management solution (like 1Password, LastPass, etc) where you can give someone access to the system without giving them access to your actual passwords. Turn on two-factor authentication. Only provide access to the tools needed to complete the job.

Con #6: Dependence on Internet & Technology

Working remotely is a tech problem. An internet issue, software problem, broken computer, or power outage on your VA’s end can put a stop to your daily workflows.

Solution: Talk about back-up power and internet plans at the interview stage. Have a good backup plan for communication so everyone on your team knows what to do if the main tools fail.

Con #7: Cultural or language obstacles

When you employ globally, communication patterns, regional terminology or business standards can often result in little mix-ups with your internal team or your clients.

Solution: Develop simple communication rules and customer service templates. Establish your brand’s tone of voice, terms to avoid and step by step approach for speaking to customers.

Con #8: It can take a while to find the right VA

Reading resumes, setting up interviews, executing skills testing and onboarding new help takes serious labor. Just because it is on the internet doesn’t mean finding the ideal distant partner can happen in an instant.

Solution: Hire a trusted virtual assistant firm that pre-screens candidates for you or develop a straightforward, step-by-step recruiting procedure that allows you to eliminate unqualified applications swiftly.

Virtual Assistant vs Employee

It really depends on the day to day work that needs to be done as to whether you want to go with an in-house staff or a virtual assistant.

In terms of Flexibility, a virtual assistant offers you very flexible options on an hourly, half time or task by task basis. But a typical employee has less flexibility in the form of defined contractual hours and full-time schedules.

Regarding Office Standards, most traditional employees need a place to work on-site, or a planned hybrid office set-up. Office standards are non-existent for virtual assistants because they operate remotely.

When considering Benefits & Taxes, you are an independent contractor or agency and you pay your own benefits and taxes as a virtual assistant. A typical employee has benefits, insurance and payroll tax withholding to be paid by an employer.

For Direct Integration, a VA can be more or less involved and usually specializes in certain duties or processes. A regular employee tends to get more immersed into the company’s day to day culture and team dynamics over time.

In terms of Skill Sets, because a virtual assistant has a particular skill set they may be called in to cover a specific operational niche immediately, whereas an employee’s talents are often cultivated and increased over time while working for the company.

Looking at Scalability, virtual assistants add more agility to modify hours or levels of support when workloads change, compared to scaling an employee team which is sometimes slower and requires formal hiring or offboarding processes.

From a Management Standpoint, a virtual assistant is best managed through result driven outcomes and deliverable based tracking. A traditional employee often needs direct daily control and a structured on-site or remote presence.

Finally, regarding Training, a virtual assistant receives role-specific procedural onboarding related directly to standard operating procedures, whereas a regular employee generally receives more general corporate training and long-term career development.

One is not better than the other – it is depending upon the work. In-house employee is often preferable for core strategic jobs that demand daily face-to-face teamwork. VA is great for modular, process-driven duties.

When the Pros Balance the Cons

A virtual assistant is often a huge return on your investment when your firm fits the following criteria:

• All work is done on computers, cloud applications and web tools. The tasks are all digital.
• Steps are easy and repeatable. Work follows logical guidelines, basic templates or easy to follow directions.
• It’s easy to tell if the work was done well (such look to see if invoices went out, or spreadsheets were updated) and you can review the work yourself.
• Your admin calendar is full. You’re spending hours each week scheduling, maintaining your inbox or typing up data instead of expanding your business.
• You need flexible help. Businesses have busy seasons and slow seasons and you need to be able to alter help without taking on permanent full time salaries.

When is a VA NOT the best choice?

Or, if you’re in any of the following situations, you might not be able to fix your staffing problems by hiring a remote virtual assistant:

• You need to be able to get your hands dirty: The job involves replenishing physical shelves, meeting walk-in clients, or repairing equipment at your local office.
• The task requires continual, minute-by-minute direction: The work is absolutely different every single hour without established regulations and needs someone sitting right next to you.
• You need high level strategic judgments: The function entails key executive decisions, legal responsibility or driving long term company strategy.
• Remote access is not allowed due to severe privacy rules: You are not authorized to legally or internally share system access with outsiders, offshore workers.

How to Minimize the Cons

Want to maximize the benefits of hiring a virtual assistant and reduce the risks? Try this easy hiring framework:

1. Develop a Short Job Description: Before you post the job position, set down the precise daily tasks, software tools, working hours and communication habits you expect.
2. Test of Practical Abilities: Never, ever hire someone because they passed the interview. Assign your best candidates a paid test assignment, anything that resembles the kind of work you perform. Writing an email answer or organizing a spreadsheet are good examples.
3. Begin with a Trial Period: Don’t sign a long term contract right away – give your potential assistant a 30 day trial period and see how they communicate, whether they are punctual and the quality of their work.
4. Create Basic SOPs: Create visual checklists and record short screen movies to eliminate guesswork from day to day tasks. Write down basic step by step guidance.
5. Set Performance Goals: Let success be an actual number. Instead of measuring hours online, tally finished items: tickets closed, leads gathered, articles written.
6. Give Regular Updates: Have your assistant send out short daily or weekly summary notes, listing what was accomplished, what is in process, and what problems they encountered.
7. Check-in Standard Times: Have quarterly meetings to provide valuable input, adapt your processes and agree on the business goals for the next period.

Hiring a Virtual Assistant

Thinking about employing a virtual assistant? So here are some short things to ask yourself to discover if your firm is really ready:

• Task Audit: What are you regularly spending time on that doesn’t require your expertise?
• Remote Check: Are the specific tasks possible with just cloud tools and an internet connection?
• Hours Needed: How many real hours a week will it take to get those jobs done?
• Skills Needed: Do you need someone to provide basic administrative support or someone with advanced technological skills?
• Access Needs: What software programs and password rights will your assistant require to get the job done?
• Quality Check: How do you know the project was well done?
• Reclaimed Time: What high value revenue generating tasks would you conduct when your calendar opens up?

Calculate the Possible Return on Investment (ROI)

Focusing on the hourly cost of a virtual assistant is not seeing the whole picture. Don’t think of the VA as an added expense, but a method to free up your time and unlock value.

Bottom line is: If you’re worth $100 an hour as a business owner, spending 10 hours a week fighting email congestion, calendar mix-ups and hand-writing invoices costs your business $1,000 in lost owner productivity per week.

But if you hire a superb virtual assistant to accomplish the same 10 hours a week for $20 an hour, your real cost out of your own pocket is simply $200. That’s an instant $800 net savings of your own time and gives you back 10 full hours to spend acquiring new clients, inventing new products or building solid industry alliances.

Avoid These Mistakes When Hiring a VA

Many business owners run into difficulties when they utilize virtual assistants because they fall into a few basic hiring traps that are easy to avoid.

• Hiring for price alone: Always picking the cheapest choice results in poor communication, low quality work, and a high staff turnover rate.
• Giving overly vague directions: If you instruct someone to “take care of social media” without post rules, brand voice guides, or schedules, you’re going to receive messy work.
• Delegating everything on Day 1: Handing over all of your backend business activities to a new hire all at once is overwhelming. Pass duties off one at a time.
• Inability to track performance indicators: Expecting your assistant to do fantastic work but never showing them what good results look like.
• Verbal training only: Talking things through in real sessions, but never writing basic reference aids.
• Sharing your whole account with admin access: Distribution of master passwords instead of using secure password sharing solutions.
• Micromanaging every minute: Looking at minute-to-minute activity reports instead than judging the quality of the finished product.

List of Pros and Cons

Here’s a quick summary of the main pros and cons when considering the benefits of virtual assistant support:

• Potential Benefits: You will have much reduced operational overhead, very flexible working hours, direct access to specialist capabilities anywhere in the world, more free time for the owner to create revenue and much easier business growing.
• Potential Challenges: On the difficulties side, you’ll have to work cross-timezone communication, spend time up front on training materials, deal with different skill levels when hiring, install password security protections, and tailor your management style to focus on output-based tracking.

Conclusion

A virtual assistant can give you considerable flexibility, specialized abilities and saved time – but such results don’t happen instantaneously. The best outcomes happen when the correct individual matches the right tasks, straightforward training processes, meaningful performance goals and strong communication habits.

Ultimately, whether or not to use a virtual assistant comes down to a serious evaluation of your current workload. If you’re bogged down by tedious admin work holding your firm back from the next level, deploying basic remote solutions and employing a VA could be the smartest, most profitable decision you make all year.

Frequently Asked Questions