You might have tried a virtual assistant before. Maybe through an offshore platform, or a freelancer that came to you through a referral. You probably handed over a list of tasks and hoped for the best, but within a few months you were back to doing it yourself. Now you're booking your own meetings, chasing your own invoices, and managing your own inbox, because trying again with outsourced support feels like more trouble than it's worth.
Does this ring any bells? If your last attempt cost you time you didn't have and produced work you had to redo yourself, of course you'd be cautious about giving it a second go.
What usually goes wrong with a VA hire
Most VA arrangements are built around tasks rather than fully covering a role. Usually you hand over a list: send this email, update that spreadsheet, book this flight. Your VA picks it up, completes the task and waits for the next one.
That works just fine for the odd overflow task, but it comes apart when you need someone accountable for an entire function of your business. If the person doesn't understand your processes start to finish, you end up checking their work anyway. You end up micromanaging the VA, which defeats the point of getting help in the first place.
What a managed role actually covers
A managed role at Strictly Savvy is built differently. Hand us a job description and we take over the whole role, not a list of disconnected tasks. Your inbox, your invoices, your calendar, your correspondence - whatever it is that you want the person in that role to be responsible for, we get it done. One dedicated Role Manager learns your business, owns that outcome, and is who you go to when something needs attention.
Behind your Role Manager is our team of 24 VAs, bookkeepers, and creatives, based in NZ and overseas, along with automation that handles the repeatable parts of the work. You don't have to manage that mix. You just deal with one person, and the role runs at the pace and volume you'd expect from a solid full-time hire.
After a less-than-ideal past experience, there's a reasonable objection: if there's a whole team behind the scenes, doesn't that mean even less visibility for you? It doesn't, because your Role Manager is the one accountable for the outcome. The automation and the wider team are how the work gets done properly, all you see are the results.
Earning the price, given what you've already tried
The whole role, run this way, costs $958 a week, the equivalent of NZ minimum wage for a full-time position. And you don't have to think about KiwiSaver, leave cover, recruitment costs, or any of the other risks and overheads that come with a traditional hire.
We've been running support roles inside NZ businesses since 2012, across admin, accounts, and EA functions, including plenty of professional services businesses booking their own meetings and chasing their own invoices before they called us. That's over a decade of learning what actually breaks in these roles and building a structure that answers it.
Judging it on its own terms
None of this means your instinct to try a VA the first time was wrong, or that the person you worked with was a poor choice given what was on offer. But the format and structure behind that support role really matters - a managed role gives you the accountability a task-based arrangement was never set up to provide.
If you're drowning under the weight of admin tasks in your business and weighing up whether to try outsourced support again, book a chat with Brenna and talk through what taking over a role like yours would actually look like.
