Business is booming, revenue is growing, and you’re basking in the glow of your entrepreneurial success – except, now you’re swamped with emails, phone calls, errands, and other menial tasks that you suddenly have no time for! You decide to hire an assistant to take care of everything, but you’re struggling to choose between a virtual or traditional assistant. Particularly, you want to know whether the costs are justifiable.

First, let’s clarify the differences between the two.

Traditional Assistants

Traditional assistants work at the location of your business for a determined number of hours, usually part-time or full-time depending on the tasks they handle. To hire an in-person employee, you’ll need to dedicate time and money to train them, provide them with office space, fund their job expenses, and handle things when they’ve fallen ill or taken time off. While they’re in the office, you’ll also need to ensure that they have enough tasks during working hours to justify the expense of hiring them.

When taking all of these factors into consideration, a traditional assistant typically costs around $16 per hour. If they have higher qualifications or if you require a higher skill set for complex duties, you’ll likely need to pay more.

Virtual Assistants

Virtual assistants (VAs) support your business’s needs from their own home or office, rather than at your location. Most VAs typically take care of administrative tasks but can also help take care of things that can be performed remotely, such as marketing, bookkeeping, copywriting, web design, and more. Often, VAs work as independent contractors or are part of a bigger company that provides virtual assistant services. Depending on your needs, you can find a VA that’s dedicated to you for the long-term, or one that’s part of a triage and is assigned based on the tasks you require. For example, you may be assigned a creative virtual assistant if you need design work done.

The best part is that they’re much more budget-friendly than a traditional employee. Some VA companies charge around $8.50 per hour or more; however, this price could increase or decrease depending on the company and time and skills required. A virtual assistant’s cost depends on the number of hours and tasks you require of them, but this cost is still significantly lower because of the remote work. When hiring a VA, you won’t undertake expenses related to recruitment, benefits, and other things that you would with a traditional assistant.

When deciding whether a virtual or traditional assistant works best for you, it’s important to consider what tasks you’ll need them to do and whether they’ll need to have certain skills to accomplish them. For more executive duties that require a hands-on approach, a traditional employee would likely suit you best.

However, if you only need an assistant to take care of administrative, menial, or simple tasks that can be done remotely, there’s no doubt that a virtual assistant is the best option. By hiring a VA, you’ll cut back on expenses and can then use those extra savings to scale your business faster and expand your operations into other departments, such as improving customer service, product research, or marketing campaigns.