Why You Need a Virtual Assistant in 2026
Zack AllenJanuary 4, 20266:02
The math on buying back 20 hours a week, when it makes sense and what changes after you hire.
In 2025, my recruitment firm made 47 placements for clients. My e-commerce business has done $4.2 million in revenue since 2022, and my team in the Philippines helped get it there and runs my operations.
The return on a virtual assistant
I see hiring a virtual assistant as buying back your time. From countries like the Philippines or South America, a full-time hire might cost around $7 an hour.
Say 40 hours a week is unrealistic to delegate, so you hand off 20 hours of your work. It might take them the full 40 hours to do what took you 20. That's about $1,200 a month, or around $300 a week.
Now, you don't use those 20 hours to do nothing. You spend them on work worth, say, $200 an hour to your business: sales, outreach, funnels, whatever it is in your model.
That's $4,000 a week from those 20 hours. Minus the roughly $300 a week for the hire, you net $3,700 a week, or about $14,800 a month you're missing out on by doing work that could be taught to someone else.
When it makes sense
You already have revenue. I don't see a virtual assistant as a way to go from zero to one. It accelerates a machine you've already built. Our minimum for clients is $10,000 a month in profit, and many are well above that.
You can name one high-value task you don't have time for. If your day were longer, what would you spend the extra hours on? If you have a clear answer, it's time.
Focus matters too
Beyond the money, there's focus. When you're juggling sales, marketing and fulfillment, your brain keeps switching. Half the effort goes to rebuilding context just to make decisions. Your focus gets spread across low-value, low-leverage work.
A virtual assistant takes that off your plate so your time goes to sales, or making videos like this one, or whatever you do best.
What changes after you hire
Your time goes to the highest value work. There's plenty in your business only you can do, and I'd never delegate it. I want all your time on that, with everything else out of the way.
Your business keeps running after you log off. Depending on time zones, work keeps moving after 5 p.m. And if you work Eastern time, it's still 2 p.m. on the West Coast when you stop.
You see you can build something bigger than yourself. For a lot of our clients, a virtual assistant is their first experience building a team. They're stuck doing everything alone, can't scale because of it, and can't afford or stomach a local hire. The first hire shows them they can build a business, not just a job where they do every part.
The takeaway
The better you allocate your time, the more money you make. Two hours of work don't have equal value. One can be worth $0, like customer service. Another can be worth $200, like calling a lead.
By hiring from countries where the US dollar goes far, like the Philippines and Latin America, you get a huge return compared to hiring locally. Hire the right person, the right way, and you stop leaving that $14,800 a month on the table.
Transcript
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Today we're going to cover why you need to hire a virtual assistant. In 2026, in 2025, we did 47 placements in our overseas recruitment firm for our clients. My e-commerce business has done $4.2 million in revenue since 2022 and have my own team in the Philippines. It has helped me get there and run all my operations. Now, first we're going to cover the ROI, the return on investment that is possible by hiring a virtual assistant.
Now, I see hiring a virtual assistant as a way to buy back your time. And when we hire from developing countries like the Philippines, like South America, you're looking at around $7 an hour for this calculation purpose for a full-time salary. Now, let's say 40 hours a week is a bit unrealistic for you to delegate off. So, let's say you're able to get half that 20 hours every week that you're able to buy back off your plate by hiring a virtual assistant. and it's going to take them 40 hours a week to do that task it took you.
So let's assume we're delegating this for $1,200 every single month. But now you don't just take those 20 hours and do nothing. You spend that 20 hours on the work that is more valuable. It's worth $200 an hour to your business. Whether that be sales, whether that be doing outreach, doing funnels, whatever that is for your specific business model, you allocate it towards there. Now, if we are able to make 4K a week with that 20 hours and it costs us 30 hours a week to get that off our plate, comes out to a net of $3,700 every week.
Extrapolate that out to a month. You're missing out on $14,800 every single month by not hiring a virtual assistant and still doing those 20 hours of work every single week that could be taught, that could be delegated to someone else. Now, when does it make sense for your business? When do these numbers actually pencil out to be that much, if not way more? The first criteria is that you actually have some sort of revenue already being driven.
I don't see virtual assistants as a way to get from zero to one. I see it as a way to accelerate the machine you've already built. And so, our minimum when working with clients is $10,000 a month in profit. And a lot of them go way higher than that. And the second criteria is that you can think of one his thing. You can think of one high-v value task that you don't have time for in your day.
Just that one thing where you're like, "Oh man, if I had, you know, if my day was longer, if I had a couple more hours in my day, this is what I would spend it on." That's when it makes sense to hire a virtual assistant. Now, outside of a financial perspective, there's also the focus perspective of if you're got all these different aspects of the business, the sales, the marketing, the fulfillment, and your brain is constantly switching to all these different things.
Half of it is just building up the context to be able to do the work, to make the decisions. And so your focus becomes diluted in all these different areas towards stuff that is low value, that is low leverage. And so by hiring a virtual assistant, you can get that off your plate so that your your time is just focused on the sales on making YouTube videos like this. Now, when you actually end up hiring a virtual assistant on your team, what changes?
Well, first off, your time becomes directed towards the highest value work. There's plenty of stuff in the business that only you can do that I would never recommend delegating, but I want all your time to be focused towards that one task, those one area of expertise that you are good at and getting everything else out of the way. And what also changes is your business ends up running after you log off.
Depending on how you structure your team and your time zones, you can make it so I mean, you probably don't work 9 to5, but let's assume you work 9 to5. After 5:00 p.m. hits, you can still have people moving things forward, moving the business to where you want it to go without you being online. Now, especially if you work like EST hours and you're off at 5, still 2 p.m. in uh in in Pacific, so you can keep things moving forward after you're off.
For a lot of our clients, hiring a virtual assistant is their first foray, their first experience into building a team because they're stuck between the like I am doing everything alone in the business, but I can't scale because of that. I'm limited by my hours in a day and hiring locally is a crazy burden. I don't I can't afford that to to hire locally or I can't stomach that. And so hire your virtual assistant is the first way to realize to get an experience of like, oh wow, I can really build something that is bigger than myself.
I can build a business, not just have a job where I have to do every single part of it. And you're able to capture that $14,800 every single month that we spoke about in the example. Takeaways here are that the better you allocate your time, the more money you make. As a business owner, doing two, say you have two tasks. One is not does not have an equal dollar value to the other.
One can be worth $0 to the business, like customer service, and one can be worth $200 an hour to the business, like picking up the phone, making a call to a lead that you have. And so, the better we are able to allocate our hours, the more money you make in the business. And who doesn't want to make more money? I bet you do if you're watching this video. And by hiring from developing countries like the Philippines, like Latin America, where the US dollar goes very far, we're able to get an insane ROI, especially relative to hiring locally.
And by hiring a virtual assistant effectively, done the right way, you're able to stop losing that $14,800 every single month. Now, virtual assistant at its core is a very broad term. It can mean a lot of different things. We've hired for a lot of different specific roles, but like virtual assistant is is the the term that most people understand. And so, in the next video, we're going to talk about what role to hire for in 2026.
So, if you want to click that video, it will be linked right here. I'll see you over there.
