Searching for a Virtual Assistant
Lately I have found myself with more things to do than time to do them. A lot of these things could be done by someone else. While there are certain parts of my personal and professional life I would never dream of delegating, there are a LOT of tasks that I would just like to see go away. With that in mind I have started to enter the murky depths of finding a virtual assistant.
This is more complex than you might think. Do I want a dedicated assistant, who is the same every day? Do I want a team? Or should I just have a service that I offload tasks to and let them worry about the staffing aspect?
When it comes to virtual assistants, there are more options than you can imagine. Just consider the simple matter of geography. I can hire a VA from the Philippines for $4-$5 per hour. I am assured the speak English fluently, and are very professional. But am I comfortable offloading aspects of my business to someone halfway around the world. How do I verify their qualifications? Now, I spend half of each year thousands of miles away from my clients in a different country, but they have at least met me, and my primary job is in a very niche industry. Anyone who wants to retain me can easily find out if I am for real or not. But how do I trust a total stranger with important business tasks?
On the other end of the spectrum - there are virtual assitant services right in Canada. I assume they are much more expensive, but they tend to be somewhat cagey about pricing. Check out this screenshot from virtualassistantcanada.ca
No prices - not per month, per hour, nothing. You click on the free consultation, and then they want to phone you. Guess what - one of the major reasons I want a virtual assistant is so I don’t have to spend time on the phone!
Similarly powerhausva.ca lays out the process, which is a whole series of calls!
30-minute discovery call, then a deep-dive call, then a meet and greet, then onboarding kickoff? It would be easier just to hire a real assistant. This sounds like hours of work. I am looking to lighten my load, not add to it.
There is definitely a trend - the likely higher priced services have more hoops to jump through. Once you go to all this work, you aren’t likely to quickly cancel. But surely there is a misalignment here: when offering a service to overworked people who are struggling to find time for administrative tasks, the solution can’t be to require them to spend hours of time on the administrative task of finding a VA!
Online review sites are no better - they are mostly just AI generated articles designed to promote a sponsored option. The wording is remarkably similar between the sites; after a while you are sure you read this exact article before.
I found a site which sounded promising - The Canadian Association of Virtual Assistants. This sounded promising - links to VAs, most with their own private web site. Was this what I had been looking for? Sadly, no. Many of the linked web sites were down (looks like some didn’t pay their Wix.com bill), and none of them laid out a simple price schedule. They want a bunch of phone calls.
I get it - any service provider must understand the needs of their client, and an actual conversation - as opposed to a series of emails - is the best way to gain this information. But in this particular niche, I think a simple web site that laid out a set price for a specified number of hours, and a list of available services, would be a popular pick. If I was interested in being a VA my site would have the banner - “sign up with no phone calls, cancel anytime”. That would be the site I would use.
So then I decided to take my search for a virtual assistant to the next (virtual) level. Can ChatGPT help me? Not as a VA, but to find one? So here is the prompt I gave GPT 4.o: “Help me find a virtual assistant. My priorities are: simple sign up procedure with no long introductory phone calls required, transparent pricing, affordable, offer a wide array of services, and flexible hours. Some weeks I might need more time, others less. I will at times want them to make calls for me, set up appointments, and organize my billable time. Some social media management may also be in order.”
The first answers were more expensive than I anticipated. $38/hour seemed a bit steep for what I needed, which was what ChatGPT said “Time Etc” would cost. Wing Assistant quoted prices from $700-$1100 per month - but it did come with 80-160 hours per month. But this is my first foray into the VA space - I am not sure if I will need that much time.
Further prompting got me one recommendation that seemed interesting - fancyhands.com. Instead of a flat hourly rate, you subscribe for a set number of “requests” each month, and these roll over. The site says that one request is about 20 minutes of work, but the site also uses booking a haircut appointment as a request. I have never needed more than 5 minutes to book a haircut. The “recommended” package is 5 requests a month for $55. Getting charged $11 for a 5 minute call? Maybe I am out of touch, but that seems excessive.
One option stood out for my first baby step into the world of having a VA - onlinejobs.ph. As the “.ph” may have given away, it is based in the Philippines. I like that they offer a lot of filter options to find the right assistant, and offer “gig'“ work - I can hire for a one off. I’m going to give them a try with some easy tasks first, then ramp up to more complicated ones. Who knows, maybe I will hire them to take all the calls necessary to find a Canadian VA. ;)
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