The Hidden ROI of Hiring a Virtual Assistant

Introduction

When people talk about the advantages of hiring virtual assistants (VAs), they tend to focus on the most visible benefit: reducing costs in admin work. But in fact, the hidden ROI of hiring a virtual assistant, particularly from regions with lower labor costs, goes beyond a payroll reduction. It changes how you spend your time, how fast your team moves forward, and how resilient your business or professional practice becomes when your workload increases or becomes unpredictable. 

In the following sections, we’ll look at the benefits of hiring a virtual assistant that are not so obvious. The hidden ROI of hiring a VA isn’t visible if you do a basic cost comparison. Follow along to see how you can turn those gains into measurable numbers so you can discover the real return on investment of hiring a VA.  

What We Mean by ROI When You Hire a VA

When business owners think about virtual assistant ROI, they usually think of how much they would pay per hour when compared to hiring a local in-house employee. That comparison makes sense and matters in the decision. But that’s only the first fact to be considered.

A broader view of the hidden ROI of hiring a virtual assistant includes:

• The time you recover for money-making work or for work-life balance
• No more late working nights and less stress, reducing the risk of burnout
• Improved productivity. Being stress-free, you’ll achieve more in less time
• Higher-quality output, as your team members will be able to dedicate themselves to their specialized roles instead of multi-tasking
• Flexibility to scale up or down your staff without lengthy hiring cycles and without long-term commitment

So instead of asking how much you will save in labor costs, ask yourself how hiring a VA will contribute to your business growth, freeing you  to focus on revenue-generating tasks (and business expansion). 

For a broader view of how outsourcing affects growth, read our article on how outsourcing helps small businesses grow. 

Stay with us. Let’s see in depth the hidden ROI of hiring a VA; it might surprise you. 

Time (and Productivity) You Can Recover Hiring a VA

Time is priceless, but for businesses it’s also money.

A recent study carried out by Slack of 2,000 small business owners found that they lose approximately 96 minutes a day in tasks they consider unproductive. Let’s translate that into time:

• Per day: 96 minutes (1.6 hours)
• Per week (5 days): 1.6 x 5 = 8 hours a week
• Per month (average 4.33 weeks): 8 x 4.33 = 35 hours a month.
• Per year (35 monthly hours): 35 x 12 = 416 to 420 hours/ year = 10 -10.5 weeks per year

If you delegate those low-value tasks to a virtual assistant, you’ll be freeing about 1 full workday a week, or 35 hours a month, or about 10 weeks of work every year. 

Isn’t it a powerful hidden ROI of hiring a VA?

Think about it, sometimes you don’t go on vacation or don’t focus on your core tasks because you must complete secondary but necessary tasks. Yet, you’re losing that valuable time. 

But there’s more evidence on the time and productivity you could regain simply by outsourcing to a virtual assistant. 

If you’re not outsourcing and have to jump between tools, negotiations, strategic planning, and answering emails or scheduling meetings, you’re losing time as well. The American Psychological Association reports that multitasking or switching from one task to another decreases productivity. You need to reconfigure your mindset for a new task, and the same may happen when you return to the previous one. Meanwhile, Psychology Today’s article The True Cost of Multi-Tasking claims that switching tasks can waste only 1/10^th of a second, but if you switch many times a day, you lose up to 40% of your productivity.  So, it’s not just about time; it’s about the time your mind spends out of focus.

Continuing on the topic of the hidden ROI of having a VA, here’s a simple example. Let’s say you bill a client $150 per hour, or generate that amount in sales. If your VA takes 10 hours of admin work off your desk each week, that’s 40 hours a month. Even after paying for your VA’s services, you have the remaining hours for sales, strategy, or client-facing activities. Now head to our pricing page, and do your numbers. Aren’t they convincing enough?

Certainly, a remote virtual assistant won’t remove every distraction, but they can handle many of the activities or tasks that break your focus, such as: 

• Inbox sorting and routine replies
• Calendar scheduling
• Data entry and CRM updates
• File organization
• Document drafting and formatting
• Report creation
• Invoicing
• Customer follow-up

For more ideas on the tasks you can outsource, review our guide on tasks to outsource to a virtual assistant. 

Lower Stress and Reduced Burnout

First, let's differentiate stress and burnout: 

• Stress is a short-term reaction to pressure, demands or adversities.
• Burnout is a chronic physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion produced by extended stress.

 Founders and business owners tend to feel more than busy; they feel drained. As Leaders.org published, Gallup indicated that business owners suffer more stress and burnout than other workers. According to Gallup, 39% of the owners they surveyed worked more than 60 weekly hours. 

The reasons for stress and burnout in business owners include:

• Countless work hours and numerous responsibilities
• Lack of work-life balance
• Multitasking or task switching to complete the volume of tasks
• High volume of tasks and the tight deadlines cause anxiety
• Staying competitive and adapting to market changes
• Lack of support (being a solopreneur or understaffed).
• Employee management (hiring, training, and managing their staff while dealing with their primary tasks).
• Regulatory compliance (ensuring legal compliance and tax obligations without errors to avoid penalties or legal problems).
• Financial pressures (uncertainties, financial obligations, managing cash flow, being profitable).

At Virtudesk, we have the solution for you: a highly trained remote staff ready to help you with your daily tasks. Visit our services page and learn about the numerous roles you could be outsourcing to save yourself from stress and burnout. 

Do you need or want to have more time for yourself or to enjoy a healthy work-life balance? Then our blog post on how to build a business system that runs without you offers an actionable framework. 

Delegate routine tasks to a virtual assistant and change the narrative of your day, your life, and your mental health. 

Better Work Quality and Happier Clients

McKinsey research has found that managers spend almost one full day on non-managerial work, basically in administrative work. When leaders spend hours creating reports, answering emails or phone calls, responding to calendar invites, and doing many other things they find boring. Consequently, they unavoidably slip their attention out of high-stakes decisions or client interactions. 

Here comes another hidden ROI of hiring a virtual assistant. VAs can handle repeatable tasks with a steady pace and even adapt to new situations or difficult clients when the time comes. 

Over time, the consistency and steadiness they bring (trained on your company values and processes) raise the reliability of your brand. Response times shorten, deadlines are met, documents are organized, and compliance is in place. All this increases customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

Recurring clients translate to increased gains, renewed contracts, and referrals. And that’s another highly important ROI of hiring a VA. 

Flexibility, Scalability, and Business Continuity

Sometimes you need an instant staffing solution, but you also want flexibility and long-term business continuity. Outsourcing to virtual assistants is the solution. 

Flexibility: 

This is a silent benefit of hiring a virtual assistant through a business service provider, like Virtudesk. You can adjust working hours, add more VAs, or change duties when demand requires it. All that without costly full in-house hiring and long off-boarding or on-boarding cycles. 

Scalability: 

During a busy season or a product launch, you can increase your team. You decide how many hours a day or week you’ll need more assistants, and for how long. If your company is expanding to other markets or you want to provide 24/7 support, outsourcing to a service provider makes it possible. Moreover, if you add new services, you can access a pool of talented employees with a wide array of specializations. 

Business continuity: 

If someone on your local team leaves, hiring a VA will keep the process moving forward. 

You can’t afford to lose clients because you are lacking personnel or because your premises close at 6 pm. Contact Virtudesk, and you’ll find a quick replacement or a new remote staff member. 

A hidden ROI of hiring a virtual assistant includes resilience and adaptability when life, your business, or the market changes abruptly. 

How to Calculate the Hidden ROI of Hiring a Virtual Assistant

We won’t dive into complex equations here; just apply a simple methodology anyone can follow. To estimate the ROI of your virtual assistant, simply follow the steps below:

1. List the tasks you’ll delegate: Write down every repetitive admin or support task that a VA could handle.
2. Estimate the weekly hours: Add up how many hours you spend on those tasks.
3. Determine an hourly value: Use your billable rate or an estimate of how much you could earn if you spent that time on higher-value work.
4. Compare with how much hiring a VA for those hours costs you.

You can use this simple formula:

ROI = (Extra revenue + cost savings – VA cost) ÷ VA cost

• Extra revenue refers to the higher value work possible by freeing your time (the billable hours you can do).
• Cost savings refer to the expenses you avoid (e.g., tools, errors, and delegating at higher rates).
• VA cost refers to the total cash and equivalent time cost you invest in the VA. The equivalent time cost is the value of the time you spend managing, training, or supervising the VA, costs that, at Virtudesk, we can save you from.  

Important note: This is a simplified formula. For a deeper analysis you should include, for example, management time cost, ramp-up and learning curve, tools and software costs, hidden costs, intangible benefits, and scalability impact. 

5. Add “soft” gains. Even if you can’t quantify reduced burnout, fewer errors, include notes on benefits like better sleep, more free time, and fewer client complaints. (Maybe you can add the money you save on a psychologist).

After a few months, you’ll see how the hidden ROI of hiring a virtual assistant matches or exceeds your expectations. 

Why Work with Virtudesk for Long-Term ROI

Finding a virtual assistant on your own is feasible. You could easily hire one through any of the freelancing platforms. But you’ll have to do the screening, recruiting, training, and management yourself. That means time and money. Another factor to consider is that hiring a freelancer, you risk continuity. What would happen with the work if that VA gets sick or simply vanishes? 

As a leading business service provider, our team at Virtudesk handles all that for you. 

With us, you’ll have:

• Fast access to trained VAs (covering diverse roles across many industries)
• Help to match your VA’s skills with your goals and tools
• Quick replacement if your first VA isn’t your ideal or has any problem that doesn’t allow them to keep working
• Time-tracking and monitoring tools that keep work organized, on track, and provide instant reports

Now you know the hidden ROI of hiring a VA. If you want to know more, we invite you to read how hiring a VA helped one of our clients to regain family time, peace of mind, and increase revenue. Check the article Is it Worth Hiring a Personal Virtual Assistant?. 

Conclusion

We invite you to explore the benefits and hidden ROI of hiring a virtual assistant for your business. Call us at +1 (800) 470-8136 or schedule a free discovery call. Our team will be delighted to review your business characteristics and workload. With that information, we’ll suggest where and how a virtual assistant can bring the highest return in your daily and long-term operations.