How Much Does an Employee Cost Compared to a Virtual Assistant?
I came across this great article, written by Catherine Gladwyn which explains how a Virtual Assistant not only saves you money, but also time.
You’ve seen people promoting themselves as Virtual Assistants, you’ve possibly even had an email from one offering their services. But come on, £35 an hour for a VA compared to £12.71 for an employee? Wait there, let’s do some maths…
For the purpose of this experiment, we’re going to assume you’d like someone full time.
£12.71 multiplied by 37 hours a week = £470.27 per week / £24,454 per annum.
So not only are VAs wildly more expensive per hour they’ve also been lying with all their ‘we work out more cost effective’, right? You’re wrong and I’m going to tell you why.
We are equal business owners, our reputations are as important as yours. It’s vital our business succeeds so there’s a secret handshake from the off that we’ve got your back. We admire your success and we’re here to take away some of the work that comes with it.
You will not be our only client though. We work to the 20% Rule, whereby no one client takes up more than 20% of our time, or our income.
This just means we’re not relying on you for our income, we aren’t dragging things out, we allocate sufficient time to work on your tasks / projects and once the work is done, the clock stops.
Virtual Assistants really do save a business owner time
Yes, we track our time, so you know exactly what you’re paying for.
Amazon delivery – clock stops
School calls to say child number 3 is sick – clock stops
Need to pop out for something to eat – clock stops
Virtual Assistants are also incredibly efficient. On average, I’ve found that we tend to do a full time job in half the time. We’re not rushing, we just don’t waste any time. Did you know, on average, employees waste 15 minutes every hour.
So, let’s look at the VA sums ever so quickly
Virtual Assistant: £35 per hour multiplied by 18.5 hours a week = £647.50
I’ve deliberately omitted an annual cost because you might not need us every week of the year.
But it’s still more expensive? I hear you huff. Wait, listen, for just a few minutes more…
The £647.50 (or however many hours you need us) is all you pay. Finito. You don’t pay anyone else for our existence in your business, whereas there’s a whole lot of other costs you need to account for if you’re going to take on an employee.
Extra costs associated with an employee
Here are just a few examples, which I know you’d have considered:
National Insurance contributions
Pension contributions
Office rent
Training
IT equipment
Holiday pay
Sick pay
Employers’ liability insurance
New equipment / repair costs / retained IT support
Payroll / accountancy costs
Your time is also money!
With an employee, you’ve also got to factor in the time it’ll take you to write a job description, advertise it (read through applications from people with zero experience in anything you’ve asked for), interviews… ugh. Or, of course you could get a recruitment agency to help you.
Recruiters charge between 10-30% to find you an employee (after you’ve spent time having meetings about what it is you want). Let’s pick the median – 20%. So, if you’re looking to hire someone full time at £24,454 it’s going to cost you £4698 for the privilege (2).
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