Hiring a virtual assistant with an endless list of talents sounds great – but those talents will be of little use if you can’t make the relationship work financially.
As well as assisting you with work tasks (which could be anything from small design fixes through to managing your accounts), VAs should contribute positively to your bottom line.
But this can only happen if you hire a VA at the right price. So how much exactly should you be looking to spend when you are in the market for a virtual assistant?
How much should you be looking to spend on a VA?
The answer to this question depends on a number of different factors. Costs for a VA range from $1 per hour for a person with limited English skills and little or no work experience, through to $50 per hour for a locally based expert VA.
As an average, you should be looking at somewhere between $4-8 per hour, which by Western standards is an extremely reasonably priced solution for some valuable help with your business.
The whole point of hiring a virtual assistant is that the work is location independent. If you need somebody with an accounting head to take care of your business finances, all that is really required of that person is a relevant skill-set and the time needed to help you out. They could be located on the next street from you or on the other side of the world. But, of course, hiring somebody on the next street is going to put a much larger dent in your VA budget than if you were to hire from the Philippines, for example, where the cost of living is far lower and skilled people can afford to work to a lower rate.
Job by job or hourly contract?
But location is not the only factor that determines how much you should be paying a VA. Hiring somebody for a contracted number of hours each week will normally be a far more cost effective solution than outsourcing work on a job by job basis. This is because the job security you offer somebody via a formal contract is far greater and you may be able to negotiate an attractive rate as a result.
Managed or freelance?
You should also consider whether you wish to hire a VA using a “managed” service such as Virtual Helpers, or whether you’d prefer to spend the time to use a “DIY” service such as Elance, which involves posting a brief for the job and letting the winning candidate complete their work in direct contact with you.
While a managed VA service is going to cost you a bit more, there are huge gains to be achieved from this kind of outsourcing. You save a lot of time in that you don’t have to create job descriptions, wait for people to apply, then sift through the (sometimes hundreds) of results finding the right person. With a managed VA service the hard work has been done for you and you are simply assigned a VA who’s already been trained and fully vetted.
Here at Virtual Helpers, we have done all the hard work of hand picking skilled and motivated virtual assistants so that you can spend more time building your business and not worry about becoming a professional recruiter with what little spare time you have.
Simply head to our Purchase page to get the ball rolling and invest in a skilled VA who can help you with essential business tasks and enable your business growth.
Here are the 28 ways a virtual helper can help you free up the time in your day to do what you do best. This one-page diagram will give you dozens of ideas for ways you can take back your precious time with the help of a virtual assistant.
Enter your details for instant access. We respect your privacy and will never share your email address.
Leave a Reply