Is a virtual assistant worth it?

This is the question I get most often, usually a few seconds after someone has seen the monthly price. The honest answer is that it does not add up for everyone. There is a calculation underneath it, and you can run it yourself in two minutes without ever speaking to me.

At what hourly rate does a virtual assistant pay for itself?

I work with monthly packages, not loose hours. That means your effective hourly rate drops as you take more hours. Ten hours a month costs 840 euro, so 84 euro per hour. Sixty hours costs 4200 euro, which puts you at 70 euro per hour. All amounts exclude VAT, there are no setup fees and you can adjust every month.

That effective rate is your break even point. The moment the hours you free up earn you more than what you pay for them, the sum is in the black. If your own hourly value sits below it, the sum is not.

Which package fits your week is covered in how many hours you need. What sits inside those hours, and why the rate differs per package, is set out in what does a virtual assistant cost.

How do you work it out for your own situation?

Three steps, that is all it takes.

1. Work out what your hour is worth. If you bill by the hour, that is simply your rate. If you work with fixed prices, divide last month's revenue by the number of hours you actually worked.
2. Count the hours you would really hand over. Not what you hope to lose, but what you demonstrably spend now on admin, inbox and planning.
3. Multiply those hours by your hourly value and put the result next to the monthly price of the package you would need.

An example with made up figures, purely to show the sum. Say you bill 95 euro per hour and lose ten hours a month to admin. That package costs 840 euro. Those ten hours are worth 950 euro of billable time to you. So you swap 840 euro of cost for 950 euro of revenue, you keep 110 euro and the admin is no longer on your desk.

Now take someone billing 60 euro per hour, also an example. The same ten hours bring in 600 euro against 840 euro of cost. On the arithmetic alone that person is 240 euro short. That does not automatically make outsourcing pointless, but it does mean the argument has to sit somewhere other than money.

There is one more condition underneath all of this that almost everyone skips: you have to fill those freed up hours with work that earns. Free up ten hours and spend them pulling harder at the same thing, and you have made an expense, not an investment.

When is a virtual assistant not worth it?

I would rather be honest here than helpful. There are situations where I would say: not right now.

• Your hourly value sits below the effective rate and you have no work lined up to fill the freed time with. Then you are moving cost around without putting revenue against it.
• You structurally have very little to hand over. Below a couple of hours a week there is not much to transfer and you are mostly paying for availability.
• Everything lives in your head. If nothing is written down and you have no time to explain anything, the first month costs you more time than it returns.
• Your revenue is too erratic for a fixed monthly cost. A fixed amount on top of an unpredictable month is a bad plan, however good the sum looks on paper.
• What you actually want is a sparring partner who thinks with you about the direction of your business. That is a different role and you do not buy it by the hour.

Only the third one is fixable in the short term, by writing down a single process first and handing that over. The rest are not. If you are weighing outsourcing against hiring someone, virtual assistant or employee puts the two side by side.

What do you get out of it when you cannot put it in money?

For some people the sum falls just short and it is still worth doing. That is where the return sits.

• Things stop going stale. Invoices that leave two weeks late cost you no hours, but they do cost you cash in the bank.
• Fewer mistakes. Work you squeeze in at eleven at night goes wrong more often than work someone does in daylight with attention.
• Less switching. Jumping from your own work into your inbox five times a day costs more than the minutes you visibly spend there.
• Quiet. Knowing the inbox has been gone through makes a difference in your head, Sunday evening included.

One caveat: none of this is an argument for talking a losing sum into a winning one. These count when you land roughly on the line, not when you are far below it. If you want to keep it small, start with which tasks you can outsource and hand over only what comes back every week.