A virtual assistant or an executive hire
Compare a virtual assistant against an in-house executive assistant on loaded cost, judgement required and confidentiality before you commit to either.
You are losing hours and the options look interchangeable
Your week is full of scheduling and invoice chasing and travel bookings and chasing people for documents. Somebody has suggested a virtual assistant on a monthly retainer. Somebody else has suggested hiring a proper executive assistant. The two quotes look close enough that the decision seems to be about price.
It is not about price. The two arrangements differ in what they can absorb. A virtual assistant takes defined tasks off your list. An executive assistant takes decisions off your list. Working out which of those you actually need settles the question faster than any cost comparison.
What each costs and what the quote excludes
A virtual assistant retainer excludes a great deal. It does not cover tools or subscriptions bought in your name. It usually does not cover your own briefing time which is substantial in the first two months. And it does not cover the hours nobody counts when a task comes back wrong and you redo it yourself.
An employee's salary is not the cost of an employee. The loaded figure includes statutory contributions and any insurance you provide and equipment and a share of space and the recruitment effort and the notice period you must honour on both sides. How the statutory obligations apply depends on your headcount and the state you operate in and a qualified professional should confirm the position for your business before you build a budget on it.
The asymmetry that matters is exit. Ending a retainer is a notice email. Ending an employment relationship is a process with legal obligations attached. GST at 18% applies on an assistant engaged as a service and that treatment differs from a salaried hire.
Who should not take each route
Do not use a virtual assistant if the work needs physical presence or handles material you cannot send outside your systems. Signing documents and receiving visitors and managing a cash register and anything involving customer financial records or regulated data are poor fits. Businesses sign a remote retainer and then discover a third of the intended work cannot leave the office. The retainer still bills.
Do not make an executive hire if you cannot describe a full week of work. An underused assistant sitting beside you is more expensive and more awkward than an unused retainer and the relationship deteriorates in a way that is hard to reverse. A founder who needs eight hours of support a week should buy eight hours.
Do not use either if the real problem is that you will not delegate. Both arrangements fail identically in that case and the retainer merely fails more cheaply. Before you spend anything write down five recurring tasks and hand them to somebody already on the team this week. If you take them back the issue is not staffing.
How to decide between them
List two weeks of the work you want to shed. Mark each item against four tests. Does it need judgement about priorities or only execution. Does it need context about people and history that would take months to build. Is it confidential. And does it need somebody available at the same moment rather than within a day.
Tasks that fail none of those tests are retainer work. Calendar management and research and data entry and travel logistics and document formatting and inbox triage all travel well to a remote assistant working on a brief.
If a substantial share of the list needs judgement or deep context or same-moment availability then you are describing a role and not a task list. Hire it. The middle case is common and the sensible answer there is a retainer now and a review in two quarters once you can describe the role from evidence rather than from frustration.
How to judge whether it is working
Hours delegated is the flattering metric. It counts the transfer and not the outcome and it rises steadily while your own week stays exactly as full as it was.
Measure your own reclaimed hours spent on work only you can do and measure the rework rate. Rework is the honest one. A task that comes back needing correction has cost you the briefing plus the review plus the correction and three of those a week erases the arrangement entirely. Track it weekly for the first two months because a falling rework rate is the only reliable sign that the brief is landing.
The common mistake
The expensive error is delegating tasks without delegating the decision that sits above them. You hand over travel booking and keep approval of every flight. You hand over the inbox and keep the right to answer anything important. The assistant becomes a queue and you remain the bottleneck while now paying for the queue. The time saved is close to zero and the conclusion drawn is that assistants do not work.
The second error is hiring in-house for confidentiality reasons without changing anything else. An employee with the same unrestricted access as a contractor and no agreement defining it gives you the cost of a hire and the exposure of a retainer. If confidentiality was the reason for the hire then access controls and a written agreement are part of the decision and not an afterthought.
This guide explains how something works. It is not legal, tax or financial advice, and rules change. Confirm anything regulatory with a qualified professional before you act on it.