The Gritty Virtual Assistant Blog

A prospective client recently contacted me and asked a question that I thought would make for a great Dear Gritty VA post. Here it is:

Dear Gritty VA:

If we work together, will you be outsourcing any of my work? Do you subcontract to other Virtual Assistants? –LA

Just as clients shouldn’t be doing everything themselves in their business, neither should Virtual Assistants. They are business owners/solopreneurs as well. However, I know why you are asking. There is a trend lately where people are calling themselves Virtual Assistants when all they are really doing is farming out client work to individuals who subcontract with them. That is not Virtual Assistance. There is no personal one-on-one relationship dynamic involved in working like that, which is exactly the thing that makes Virtual Assistance what it is.

There are all kinds of pitfalls when working with a company that treats the work transactionally like that. I hear about them all the time from clients and from the Virtual Assistants who are being farmed out or taking on subcontracted work. The chief complaints I hear are that clients don’t like having their work sent out to people they don’t know (if they wanted to hire someone else, they would have done that in the first place). They frequently complain of problems with consistency in service and poor work quality in these arrangements as well. And for the Virtual Assistants, well, they just don’t make any money and often have to deal with issues of late or non-payment. It sounds like you have encountered your own negative experiences with that type of arrangement as well.

My business model is not one where I do the marketing and then spread out and rely on non-employees to do the work. I am the craftsman in my business. When clients hire me, it’s my brain and my skills and my expertise they get.

That said, I do have my own staff as well as my own Virtual Assistant who help me in my business. I have this help not only so that I can create the same kind of smooth-running business and life of freeddom that clients are seeking to create themselves, but also, ultimately, because it allows me to provide my clients with vastly superior support and attention. It does my neither me nor my clients any good whatsoever if I’m frazzled, overworked and spread too thin.

But here’s the difference… my relationship with clients is never outsourced. When clients hire me, it’s me they work with directly. Mainly, my staff and VA help me with things related to the running of my business. There are also instances when I might delegate certain tasks or non-critical parts of my work. But my responsibility and control over the proper completion, quality and accuracy of the work is never abdicated or outsourced.

I don’t farm out or subcontract anything to any stable of Virtual Assistants I may or may not know well. I only work with my own employees and my own VA. I pay my VA a full monthly retainer for a body of support just like you pay me. If there’s something additionally a client needs that I don’t provide under my own roof, I can refer them or help them find the proper professional whom they can hire directly.

If a one-on-one partnering solution is what you are seeking, there is no place for a middleman in the equasion.