Somewhere out there right now, someone is writing a job ad that goes a bit like this.
“Looking for a VA to help with my inbox, manage my socials, do a bit of bookkeeping, onboard new clients, edit my podcast and keep my systems tidy. Around 8 hours a week. Must be proactive and a self-starter.”
Eight hours. One person.
I understand completely why it happens, but what’s being described there isn’t one job. It’s five, maybe six, bundled into a single hire because that felt like the affordable, simple way to finally get some help.
“A VA” is not a job description
The word VA does a lot of heavy lifting in online business. It’s become shorthand for “the person who does all the stuff I don’t want to do”. However, the reality is that the stuff you don’t want to do isn’t one skillset – especially when it comes to B2B service provision.
Managing an inbox well is its own thing. Running social media is a whole craft. Bookkeeping is a profession with actual rules attached. Onboarding clients is operations. Writing your newsletter in your voice is closer to mind-reading.
Asking one person to be brilliant at all of that, part-time, on a generalist rate, sets both of you up to be disappointed.
Why we do it anyway
This isn’t a telling-off. There are good reasons it happens.
Budget is the obvious one. Five specialists sounds like five times the cost, so one generalist feels like the sensible call.
And when you’re overwhelmed, you’re not exactly in the headspace to map out which parts of your business need which kind of person. You just want the weight off. So you reach for the one hire that promises to take all of it.
The industry doesn’t help.
Plenty of marketing out there promises the right VA will sort your whole business out. It’s a lovely idea. It’s just not how it works.
Support is an ecosystem, not a hero
Good support isn’t one person you load everything onto. It’s a small ecosystem of the right people doing the right things.
This is the part people miss – not all of it is hiring.
Some of what’s weighing on you needs a person. Some of it needs a system you set up once and never think about again. Some of it needs a specialist for two hours a month, not a ten-hour-a-week commitment. And some of it still needs to be you, because it’s the bit only you can do.
Think of it less like finding one saviour and more like building the support around your business on purpose – the right pieces, sized to what you actually need.
Start by naming the jobs
Before you write another “VA wanted” ad, do one honest pass over everything you’re trying to hand off.
Write down every task that’s currently doing your head in. Then, next to each one, ask: what kind of work is this, really? Admin? Finance? Content? Tech? Operations?
You’ll usually find your “I need a VA” is actually three or four different roles wearing the same trench coat.
Once they’re separated out, the next questions get much easier:
- Which of these genuinely needs a person?
- Which could a system handle, so no one has to?
- Which needs a specialist rather than a generalist?
- And which one is actually yours to keep?
That’s the work I do with people in a strategy session – pulling the tangle apart so you can see what you’re really dealing with before you spend a cent (or spend more cents..) on the wrong hire.
What changes when you stop
When you stop trying to solve everything with one person, a couple of things shift.
The people you do bring in get to be good at their actual job, instead of stretched thin across five they were never suited to. You stop cycling through hires who “didn’t work out”.
And the support around you starts to feel like support, rather than one more thing you’re managing.
One brilliant person can’t be five people. However, the right few pieces, put together on purpose, will hold a lot more than you’d expect.
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