This year I’ve started using 3 remote personal/executive assistants for my work projects. Our remote assistants have been awesome and super useful, so I thought it would be useful to try and write a guide to help others get started with using remote assistants.
If working with a remote assistant doesn’t work out for you I think you’ll lose around £300 and 12 hours of your time in 1 month. But if it does work well, then I think you have a lot to gain - my estimate is my assistants save me around 20-30 hours a month.
Ways in which my remote assistants have helped me
- We have a remote assistant who does all our events logistics work, including sourcing and booking venues, booking transport and catering, and handling comms with participants and venues.
- Our assistant handles paying our bills and invoices, and sending out invoices
- Doing one-off tasks for the team e.g. booking appointments, making purchases, booking travel, finding accommodation for our interns
Where to find a remote assistant
- If you’re based in the UK or in Europe (and communicate in English), I recommend https://virtalent.com/ which is the company I use.
- I haven’t used a US-based virtual assistant before, but you could try timeetc.com. There are some other suggestions here.
- If you're looking for a full-time assistant, we use https://www.athenago.com/ and they seem consistently great.
Some tips for working with a remote assistant for the first time
- Be prepared to invest time in explaining the task and process well for your assistant. I think it’s worth spending 10 minutes explaining a task that will take 60 minutes - that will feel like a long 10 minutes and it might feel frustrating, but it’s worth it.
- Use loom.com to make video tutorials of how to do a process, instead of describing it in text
- Bring your remote assistant into Slack to be able to DM them quickly
- Invest in the relationship with your assistant from the beginning - take the time to call them once a week and message them each day to check in on how things are going because it’s easy as a remote person to feel disconnected. More communication is better.
Tips on how to delegate well
Taking next steps
- Most remote assistant setups have very flexible monthly plans. You can start with just a few hours a week and scale up from there.
- I think it’s worth just giving it a go; there’s a lot of info value in trying to get a remote assistant, and if it doesn’t work well then you can always just stop using the service.
- Book a free consultation call with Virtalent UK or Timeetc USA
Happy to answer any questions that people have, or DM for more info.
Thanks so much for writing this!
I just went through the process of trying to hire an executive assistant in the US so I thought I'd contribute a bit. My sample size is relatively low (I only tried 1-2 executive assistants from ~3 services), but here are some things I found helpful:
* In my experience additional cost --> additional quality. Boldly (the firm we will likely end up using - $50 / hour) seemed to have higher service quality than places like Time Etc. ($30 / hour)
* I tried a series of 'work tests'. Here are the two I found most predictive:
a) I'm trying to [find an Airbnb here, find a conference center, ship my bags using a remote service -- example]. Could you help me figure out the lowest cost provider that has good client reviews? Here are some other criteria that are important (X, Y).
This allowed me to see presentation of information, accuracy, and reasoning.
b) I'm interested in services from [X company]. Could you write an email inquiry about whether they are taking new clients & price? It would be great to try to find a personal email for a staff member.
This allowed me to see basic email composition skills, spelling, and resourcefulness online.
* I found it helpful to test out two companies in parallel for a month, that way I could have a direct head to head comparison. I would ask both executive assistants to perform the work tests above. I would then ask for a new executive assistant from the firm that was performing to a lower quality standard, and keep using the one that was performing well on one off tasks to get more data. I think this particularly worked in my situation because we had some lead time.