What does a VA agency actually do that I couldn't do by hiring someone myself

The "just hire them directly" thing comes up constantly and most agency contracts have a clause against it. There's usually a conversion fee, sometimes six months of billing. You'd want to read yours before assuming it's an option.

Separately, paying someone in another country directly means you're now dealing with international payroll and worker classification, and that's a question for an accountant who knows the specific country, not a forum.

Put numbers on it. Say the VA costs the agency $550 fully loaded and you pay $1,400. You're paying $850/mo, about $10k a year, for recruiting and continuity.

Now ask how often you'd need to replace. If turnover is 25% a year, you're rehiring every four years on average, and a direct hire replacement costs you maybe three weeks of your own time plus a month of degraded output. Call that $8k of pain, once every four years, so $2k a year.

That math says the markup is expensive. It's still worth it to plenty of people, because the $2k a year is an average and the actual event is a bad month at a bad time. But if you run enough seats the math flips and you go direct. That's why big users of VAs eventually build their own offshore team and stop using agencies.

ledger's numbers are the clearest version of this I've seen. The scale point matters, one seat you use an agency, twelve seats you hire a manager in country and cut the agency out.

For what it's worth juniper, the boring reason people stay is that switching is work and the current thing isn't broken. That's most of B2B services.

Wait, so the person doing my work might not even know what the agency charges me? That feels strange.

rigging, that's standard in staffing of any kind, domestic included. The temp at a warehouse doesn't see the bill rate either.

On the AI question, I'd separate the tasks. Pulling a list and scrubbing duplicates, a tool does that now and does it better. Calling forty rural owners who don't have email and getting one of them to talk about their forty acres, no tool is doing that in my markets, and the people who answer their phone in these counties will hang up on anything that sounds automated.

So it's shrinking in some places and not others.

hollow's split is the useful one. My concern would be that the shrinking part is the part that's easy to sell. Data entry is easy to quote and easy to buy. The rural cold calling is a harder sell and takes better people.

I've had four VAs through two agencies over three years. The markup bought me nothing on the first agency and quite a lot on the second, and the difference was whether the agency had a person who managed my VA or just billed me for one.

First agency, I got a resume and a login. When she went quiet for a week I emailed support and got a ticket number. Second agency, there's a team lead who I talk to monthly, she reviews call recordings, and when my guy took two weeks off there was a covering person who'd already sat in on the calls.

Same nominal service, roughly the same price. Ask which one you're buying.

flint that matches what I've heard from everyone I've asked. The word "agency" covers two totally different businesses and the price doesn't tell you which.

juniper, on whether it's on the way out: the demand side is people who want cheap help and don't want to manage anyone. That doesn't go away because a tool got better. What changes is which tasks are worth $10/hr of human attention.

I wouldn't learn about it as a thing to buy into. I'd learn about it as something you'll probably use.

The insurance framing your friend used is closer than she probably meant. What you're buying is variance reduction, and variance reduction is always overpriced when nothing goes wrong and underpriced the one month it does.

The thing I'd check before assuming the agency actually provides it: ask what their bench looks like. An agency with no bench can't cover an absence, they can only start a new recruiting cycle, and then the markup is buying recruiting only. Plenty of small agencies are in that position and don't say so.