Looking to hire an admin to help me get organized and spend more time focused on what I should be focused on. Looking for 15-20 hours a week to start, with the potential to scale up.

Where are y'all finding candidates to fill this kind of job? Posted on Indeed, received almost 300 applications, and 99% of them were terrible. If those I did interview, only one stood out, but she got another offer for full time.

Any other places I should look? Would prefer local to Houston, but would consider someone who needs to work remote.

My lives in the Philippines. She's awesome. Maybe I struck gold but she is on par with some very well paid EA's that used to work for me in previous career.

Oh, she's about 1/10th of the cost of those EA's and she's gets paid above market. The only downside is that she can't do some paperwork here. But anything electronic is doable.

https://texags.com/forums/57/topics/3416925

This guy on this board is trying to help find his daughters an admin job.

Stive said:

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For those using EA's in the Philippines: what kind of work are you having them do? Do they work U.S hours or PH daylight hours? How are you communicating with them and how often?

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Happy to answer this with my experiences.

I hired my first VA about 3.5 years ago. Over that time she has done nearly countless activities for me including at one point managing a spin up business I started that she hired three of her friends/family members to help with. I generally use her to run one facet or another of some business or entity that is requiring more of my attention than I want to give or can justify giving my own time to but can hers at a much lower hourly rate. At this point she's become a very trusted partner and friend (to the extent I fronted her a large portion of her salary a couple years ago for the down payment on a house, and she just finished paying it back this fall). I know her kids, her husband, and she knows my family, etc. I would hope and expect she'll be part of any business I do for the rest of my career.

Here are some of the tasks she/her team can do for me and have done over the years:

• she keeps my inbox clear of riff riff, especially when I'm out of office. She deletes stuff that she knows is junk, she responds to stuff she can manage, and she puts stuff in folders for me when it requires my reply.
• she can easily manage calendars, appointment setting, appointment re-setting, and just generally the back and forth that comes with moving parts whether you have a scheduling app or not
• she has found hard to find articles on topics I want to read, found presents I couldn't easily find to buy, and generally any type of internet searching that takes more than a few minutes. I know it might seem small, but this kind of stuff really adds up over days, weeks, and months to being many hours of wasted time.
• anything at all requiring significant manual data entry or research. Like "find me 20 speakers who speak on this topic and charge between $5000-10,000 for a keynote" or "find any podcast that this one person has ever been on" or "get me a list of every school district employee and their email address." and so on and so forth. I find it very easy to take some marketing and sales risks when I'm paying someone $3-5/hour to put together the data I need.
• generally what I find her most valuable at doing is taking an overarching theme or topic and breaking it down into manageable pieces that allows to quickly review, highlight where we're on the right path, throw out where we're not, and then she goes deeper where it makes sense.

Her work allows me to go way deeper and more thorough across a spectrum of tasks than I would ever be able to do otherwise.

She works Filipino hours because I don't need the stuff done during my time zone, and I absolutely love starting the day with an email from her on all the stuff she teed up for me for my day ahead. We talk every day by email when she checks in with what she's done and what she needs from me. As new stuff arises, I'll just send her a note via email and she'll get to it when she's working (end of my day). We have a call about once every 6 months probably.

FWIW, I am all in on overseas talent. I've got a web guy, video guy and gal, a designer, a PPT whiz, and on and on. Awesome folks. Great work ethic. About 20% of what I would pay in the US which lets me take a ton of swings I couldn't/wouldn't take otherwise. Hope this helps.

I hired mine in January 2021.

She does bookkeeping, scheduling, answers phones (a little bit), creates documents, checks documents, orders services from third party vendors, chases customers for documents and payments.

She basically does everything I ask her and anything a US based Admin Assistant would do with exception of postage related items. She does some mailing but it's only stuff that can do online without every physically touching a document.

I started her at 800 and now she makes 1200/month. I'd put her against my more EA's that made 6 figures in downtown Houston. In all reality, she's above them b/c of the bookkeeping.

She generally works my hours. I try to respect that fact that she has a young family and don't want to burn her out. We pay her for 40 hours a week but we don't track it. She's very efficient, so I doubt she really works that but I don't care. I have morning meeting with her at 8 am our time.

If you want to talk to me about it, DM me and we can set up a call. I'd be happy to answer your questions with more specifics.