HireMyVA FAQs
Get the Answers You Need to Your Questions
A Virtual Assistant can be full-time or part-time. The number of hours can be any amount agreed upon by you and your prospective VA together. We encourage people to hire full-time, but part-time can work for certain people and situations.
As far as your VA being an employee or contractor, that depends upon if you’re hiring from the USA or another country.
If you’re in the USA and hiring in the Philippines, for example, which is what we recommend, they are more like contractors, but since the USA has no jurisdiction, you don’t pay any taxes on them and don’t have to worry about whether or not they are contractors or employees. (Please talk with your CPA to verify this for your exact situation).
We recommend getting someone part-time for 20 hours in this case. You won’t have any problem using those hours as you’ll find MANY things for them to do. It’s rare that someone would be willing to work only 10 hours a week, so your pool of applicants will be limited. Even finding someone at 20 hours per week can be challenging since most people seeking a position tend to want full-time.
You’d really be better off “sharing” a VA with someone else; we have guidelines on this in the course.
It's harder to find someone to work part-time as most are seeking full-time hours. Also, once you hire someone, you’ll use those hours VERY easily, even when there’s downtime. We can give you SO many ideas of things for them to help you within your business.
Also, when you have someone working that many hours, your brain will shift to where you’re more strategic than tactical, and you’ll shift to having your hours be more “valuable,” and working on the things you’re best at doing.
And finally, if someone is working part-time, they may have another part-time position elsewhere, and depending upon the demands of the other employer, you could be getting the short end of things.
Normally, for a Technical VA we charge $1197 because there’s more work involved for us to properly screen people. A General VA is $997. But, if you remain part of our community, we take $200 off the price for either type of VA, making the price for our tribe either $997 or $797.
The above is a one-time fee you pay to us for the service, and you're responsible for paying your new VA on an ongoing basis.
If you choose to sign up only for the course and community, check our current pricing on the site.
Note that when you sign up for the White Glove Service, you get access to the course and community for several months included in the pricing. After that initial time period, you can then choose to continue the low monthly amount for access to everything we have, including discounts on using the White Glove Service in the future, or go it alone.
If you have the time, patience, willingness to learn, and energy to make mistakes, but want to eventually be an expert at searching for, sifting through, and then hiring properly, we recommend the course. It has been designed to help you do that, but it still takes time to go through the material and execute on the search process. Dave recently hired someone this exact way, so it does work, and it works well!
If you’re short on time and energy, want to concentrate more on your business along with the subsequent talents and skills it takes to manage a team, and have the money for the one-time fee, the White Glove Service is for you.
Note that when you sign up for the White Glove Service, you get access to the course and community for several months included in the pricing. After that initial time period, you can then choose to continue the low monthly amount for access to everything we have, including discounts on using the White Glove Service in the future, or go it alone.
Either way, we give you a path to FREEDOM in your life and business; and that path goes through three stages: PREPARE, HIRE, and THRIVE. We provide a ton of templates and tools to help you work with a VA the right way. And we make it so easy for you to copy and make those templates and tools your own.
Of course, we have a great community, with regular Q & A sessions where you can ask ANY question about your business, and leverage the experience of Dave and Larry (over 70+ years of leading and building teams in the corporate and military worlds), as well as others who have had success.
A General VA, or non-Technical VA, is someone who performs tasks that does not require detailed skill knowledge or is not as much of an expert in their field. A Technical VA normally has some skill that has taken time to acquire, has a great amount of experience, or will be managing people.
Examples of a non-Technical VA are for things like social media, graphics, admin assistant, answering phones, data entry.
Examples of a Technical VA are for things like web development, software development, accounting, SEO, Ads management.
Everyone else gets you a Virtual Assistant, and then says "Good luck!", with some general guidance along the way.
The HireMyVA White Glove service personally guides you to prepare a proper foundation for your team AND gives you the tools, techniques, and ongoing community to help you go further and faster.
During our PREPARE phase, you will get a 60-minute meeting with our team to do a deep-dive into your requirements so that we can find the right and the most awesome Virtual Assistant to help you achieve your goals! Nobody else meets with you!
In the HIRE phase, once you’ve selected someone, we meet with you to discuss the best way to get them started (onboarding). And we now offer an additional service of onboarding the VA for you, helping you get everything setup so that your new Rockstar VA shines as fast as possible!
While other VA sourcing companies will just leave you in the dark after you've hired someone, we don't! In the THRIVE phase, you get two things:
- You will get access to our course and community to help you and your new VA be successful in working together to grow your business, including monthly Q&A calls where we answer any question you have!
- We have two separate THRIVE meetings to help you tweak things and ensure you’re successful long-term.
Why do we do so much? Because we care about your success!
Yes we can, that’s what we do! We have years of experience doing this and have helped dozens of clients.
That’s why we created the THRIVE part of our hiring a virtual assistant course, and have a community of people to help. All of this leverages our decades of experience in creating and leading teams, from the U.S. Military, to nonprofits, to for profits. So we’ve seen, and experienced, the struggles and heartaches of ours and other mistakes, and we’re here to help you avoid them.
Checkout the successful stories of folks like you. They were able to do it because we’ve taken all of the guesswork out of this for you with all of our failures and trials, honing our processes in working with VAs and business owners so that you can start off on the right foot and avoid fumbling around with VAs, wasting time, wasting money, getting frustrated, and thinking this just doesn’t work.
If you follow the recipe and the step-by-step plan we provide in this tried-and-tested course, you’ll avoid the headaches, heartaches, pitfalls, and obstacles that so many other business owners experience, going it alone.
We’ve also hired people before and it hasn’t worked out. This is a “not knowing what to look for” issue when you hire... and long term, it comes down to a leadership problem. However, we’ve learned how to properly screen and vet candidates so that this rarely happens these days.
In fact, we’ve had our own struggles with hiring folks who either didn’t work out long-term or who stopped communicating after a few days. Since then, we’ve re-evaluated the process of vetting candidates, learned from the mistakes, and adjusted the process. And we’ve got VAs who’ve been with us for over seven years!
A General VA, is about $5/hour; a Technical, about $7-$10 depending upon the skill level you need. That leaves some good room to find great candidates, but this will depend upon your exact needs, and we’ll work with you on that.
A good rule of thumb is to think what someone in the USA would make and divide it by 10. So if you’re hiring a very high-level, technical person, they could demand as much as $200K per year. A high-level executive assistant could be $75K-$100K per year. So divide those numbers by 10.
HireMyVA actually recommends the Philippines as the folks there are loyal, hardworking, and speak English well. We’ve got folks who’ve been on our team for years, doing highly effective and amazing work. Using our highly refined virtual assistant hiring system allows people from all types of industries to find these folks and thrive with them in their businesses.
Yup, you got that right! We start off with a PREPARE meeting, where we understand the position you think you need, your requirements, and your business. We may suggest several things for you to do so you can properly prepare to bring someone on board, such as creating a Vision statement or Core Values. We'll talk about interview questions, a test for them, etc.
Then we go into hunting mode and find up to three candidates that we think will fit, interviewing them ahead of time. Once we are satisfied, we’ll arrange to have you interview them. You’ll then make your choice and we’ll inform the candidate you want to employ them, then we do a HIRE meeting with you where we walk you through the proper process of onboarding them. After one week, we do a short THRIVE meeting to make sure things are going OK and provide you with some quick tips. And finally, after another few weeks, depending upon your needs, we do a final THRIVE meeting where we talk more about what's going on, improvements to make, etc.
For example, during one of the last THRIVE meetings we did, we found something the client should have been doing, that she wasn’t, to increase her productivity by a lot! This didn't have anything to do with the VA, although it will eventually impact the VA.
So Thriving doesn’t just mean with your VA, it means Thriving overall!
Once you sign up, we’ll provide you with some simple exercises you can do that are optional, or we simply talk about it during our call. Ideally, you’ll go through those before our PREPARE meeting.
The length of time depends; for the White Glove Service, usually about 2-3 weeks, but it can be longer or shorter depending upon how picky you are, how special the requirements of the position are, and how long it takes to have you begin interviewing people and making the decision.
Doing it on your own will depend upon your experience and how comfortable you are. We can do it in that same timeframe as we’ve got experience, but you’ll have to allocate a week or two to understand the process.
That's why we're pretty careful by walking you through the entire process and having a couple of THRIVE calls. But if they don't work out for some reason, and you have to let them go, it's at our discretion as to what we do next, and it depends a lot upon how quickly something happens. Our terms and conditions state no refunds once we actually start looking, as you have to understand that someone could come back one year later and say "I had to fire them, I want my money back."
We’re pretty generous with what we do for our White Glove clients, and of course we want you to be satisfied.
You can have them work your hours, whatever you want. It does limit the pool of people if they are working at night, according to their time zone, or some other schedule that’s not ideal for them, so we encourage clients to think about what overlap really makes sense. We have guidance on how to do that.
You’d be surprised how many people want to work at night due to family considerations, or early in the morning, or just because that’s when they do their best work. In fact, the VAs we have at HireMyVA often want to work at night! Some are night owls and do their best work at night! So you can find someone that works the schedule that works for you. And we’ve experimented with various types of schedules and can guide you on what will work best for you. There are pluses and minuses to all of them.
It may seem you wouldn't be able to fill their time, but you definitely will! We maintain a huge list of things to do with any downtime that will help our own business move forward.
However, the best way to think about this is not necessarily on filling their time up, but think about what YOU can do with getting 20 hours back per week! Or 40! You'll be able to move to more strategic thinking, giving you the opportunity to best think how you can better serve your clients, how to add more value, allow you to take some time off without worrying, etc. Once you do that, you’ll then have them help you execute on that value or simply take care of things while you're gone. So think bigger!
We recommend using Wise as they provide a better exchange rate and lower costs than other services. You’ll need to get some bank information from your VA, then it’s really easy to transfer. We normally set calendar reminders to do the transfers to our VAs on the 1st and 15th of every month.
Here’s a link to signup, and you get a fee-free transfer of up to $600 USD, and we get a little bit of money too! https://wise.com/invite/u/davidb10155
Well, guess what? Plenty of people steal from their employers right here in the USA! How do you mitigate that? Put in proper systems. The HireMyVA methods give you help to alleviate that worry as it’s a gradual process of allowing more access AND hiring folks with high levels of integrity. The HireMyVA program has an entire training module where we talk with our VAs about what does and doesn’t work. You’ll therefore know the RIGHT time to give your VA access to increasingly sensitive information.
Of course, this can happen - it happens all of the time in the US! But in the Philippines, the culture is a culture of loyalty and stability, so we’ve rarely seen this happen.
And as part of our THRIVE module, we teach you methodologies and practices for retention, as well as how to create a culture such that your team members will want to stay with you for as long as YOU want them.
Plus, we do regular Q&A calls and you can ask questions of our community to help handle any situation that comes up.
We LOVE questions! Simply ask us your question in the contact form, or email us using info[at]hiremyva.com.