What you are actually paying for
Both of those numbers were normal. That is the part worth sitting with.
For six years I ran a VA agency. Clients paid me somewhere between forty-five and fifty-five dollars an hour. The assistants doing the work were paid between twenty-two and twenty-eight.
Nobody was being cheated. That spread is ordinary for the model, and the difference was not profit sitting in my account. It covered recruiting, cover when someone was sick, payroll and admin, quality checks, and my own time managing the relationship. Real work, really done.
But there was something I could not get past once I had seen it clearly enough.
Roughly half of what my clients paid never reached the person doing the work. And I was paid every month for that arrangement to continue.
At the midpoint of those ranges, fifty dollars in and twenty-five dollars out, exactly half arrived. At the widest spread it was forty percent. At the narrowest, sixty-two.
| Hours per week | Client paid | Assistant received | Never arrived |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | $52,000 | $26,000 | $26,000 |
| 30 | $78,000 | $39,000 | $39,000 |
| 40 | $104,000 | $52,000 | $52,000 |
Midpoint rates of $50 per hour billed and $25 per hour paid, across fifty-two weeks.
A client with a full-time assistant was spending a hundred and four thousand dollars a year. Their assistant was earning fifty-two.
Two things, and neither one of them was about ethics.
The good ones left. An assistant earning twenty-five dollars an hour knows what the client is paying. They always know. So the best of them, the ones with judgment and options, worked out that they could go direct and earn close to double, and then they did exactly that. The model was quietly selecting against the very people I most wanted to place. I was not losing the weak assistants. I was losing the strong ones, on a schedule.
And when it worked, I had to charge for it. If a client and an assistant fit well enough to want something permanent, my contract called that a buyout. The best possible outcome for both of them arrived as an invoice from me. I never once sent one of those and felt good about it.
Underneath both was the same shape. My clients did not want to rent a relationship, they wanted someone who worked for them. The assistants did not want three clients and no security, they wanted one good client, a fair rate, and enough freedom to build a life around the work. I was sitting between two groups of people who wanted the same arrangement, and charging both of them for not quite having it.
So I stopped. Not because agencies are dishonest, but because the model is paid monthly for standing between two people who would be better off knowing each other directly. That incentive does not go away by being well intentioned about it. It is structural, and I was on the wrong side of it.
What the same hire costs now
We place the assistant and hand them to you. You employ them. You pay them. We are paid once, for the search, and then we are done.
The client keeps about $36,000 in the first year. The assistant earns about $12,000 more than she would have on my old agency rate. In year two the fee is gone and the gap widens.
Both sides do better. The only party worse off is the one taking a cut every month, which is the position I used to hold.
There is no buyout, because there is nothing to buy out. They were never ours. That line on our placement page is not a marketing promise, it is the specific thing I wanted to stop doing.
An agency absorbs things a direct hire does not. If your assistant is sick, someone covers. If the match fails, that is their problem to solve rather than a search you have to run again. You can start in days rather than weeks, and you are not responsible for contracts, classification, or payroll.
If you need help next week, cannot carry any hiring risk, or genuinely do not want to manage a person, the monthly model is buying you something real and you should use it.
What you should not do is pay for it without knowing you are paying for it. Ask any agency what percentage of your rate reaches the person doing the work. Most will not tell you. That refusal is the answer.
The Blueprint decides the role, the country, the budget and the legal side before anyone is sourced. Sometimes it says do not hire yet. You still leave with the plan.
See what the Blueprint covers→