There are many things to take into consideration when deciding whether or not to hire a Virtual Assistant (VA), but it comes down to whether you want to spend time or money. For example, my husband and I recently purchased a 1940 Cape Cod home. Older homes have so much character but they, more than likely, have survived multiple homeowners with different ideas on maintaining a home.
These different ideas are most obvious in our house by simply looking up at our ceilings. Every ceiling has a different texture and most not very good ones. Since we spend the majority of our time in the family room, that’s where we decided to start. The time expended and physical pain – hello chiropractor – made me question if we would be doing it again. Which gave me an idea about deciding when to spend time or when to spend money to get something you want.
To start, you need to decide how much your time is worth and use it consistently throughout. You can’t value your time at $10 an hour and then change it to $50 an hour when you’re thinking of calling a landscaper because you hate raking leaves. If you work an hourly job making $10.00 an hour, then use that amount. If you’re a full-time salary paid employee, then divide your yearly gross salary by 2,080 hours. This amount will be how much your time is worth for your home job too. To keep things simple, we’ll use $10.00 an hour from my ceiling example:
Time Spent = 20 hours
x
Hourly Rate = $10.00
Total $200.00
+
Materials $45.00
+
Chiropractor $80.00
Total $325.00
We recently received an estimate to scrape and skim coat the other ceilings, and it worked out to be $3.17 per square foot, which includes both labor and materials. Since the family room is 242 square foot, it would have cost $767.00 to have a contractor fix it. Even with the much-needed visits to the chiropractor, we still saved $442 by doing it ourselves.
Although this is a home improvement example, it perfectly illustrates when to spend your time and when to spend money. This same exercise can be applied when a business is considering hiring a VA. More than likely, the math will be much simpler. If a business owner values his or her time at $50.00 per hour and a VA charges $20.00 an hour, the business owner would save money and time by hiring a VA. The business owner can then use the time saved to do something that makes the business money. Check out my List of Services to see what I can do to save you time and money.
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