The True Cost of Low Quality VAs In Your Business

Incompetence is incredibly expensive in business, especially when working with virtual assistants (VAs). Whenever we’re hiring, we always scan for quality and understanding of GCT (Goals, Content, Targeting) as opposed to just price. 

You’ll often see agencies hire only based on price, since $3/hour sounds better than $8/hour. After all, what difference does it make if you can shave a few dollars off?

In this article, let me walk you through what happens when a VA makes the #1 VA Mistake or isn’t up to the task and why it ends up costing so much more than you might think.

Understanding the Cycle of Inefficiency

Alright, imagine we hire a VA to repurpose a video into an article. Sounds simple, right? Here’s what tends to happen:

The amount of work that it requires us to do greatly offsets whatever work they do. For this example, we’ll use 15 minute units.

First off, they’ve got to learn the material, which might take them a good half hour. We’re talking about a process called LDT—Learn, Do, Teach. They learn first, which requires a deep understanding on the topic they are writing about.

For example, if we’re writing an article for Wirefox Electric, an electric company in Odenton, MD, the VA needs to understand who’s the owner, the area they service, what services they offer, and how they perform these services. Hence, they need to have the L in LDT before they can work on the content.

It’s when they do—the writing part—they often mess it up. The article comes back with mistakes, missing links, you name it. Even when we have article guidelines and standards, the VA either doesn’t know about them, or simply didn’t follow them.

So, what do we do?

We bring in an expert to teach them what went wrong. Ironically, the time it takes for this expert to explain and teach is about the same as it took to film the original video! 

Then, the VA goes back, tries to fix things, spends a couple more hours, and still gets it wrong. 

This cycle of doing and teaching goes on, often multiple times, each round adding more time and cost. Eventually, it resembles something like what you see below, with over 15 iterations for something that I could’ve written in 15 minutes.

Every time we go through this cycle, it’s not just the VA’s time we’re paying for. We’ve got management costs, project management software, and all sorts of other overheads. Even if a VA is cheap, the time they take and the expert interventions make the real cost much higher.

Does this look sustainable to you?

The Hidden Costs Add Up

Imagine you hired someone for $5/hour, but it then took them 20 hours to complete a task. Then, you hire a new person for $15/hour, who can complete the same task in two hours. This means one VA is charging $100/task while the more “expensive” VA is charging $30/task.

Which VA is really cheaper?

As business owners, we don’t care about the cost/hour as much as we care about tasks being completed quickly and efficiently. The marines have a saying, which is “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast”.

What this means is we’d prefer to hire someone who’s more “expensive” who can complete tasks in 1 – 2 iterations instead of 15.

The ironic part is that by screening for competency and paying more for higher quality work, we’d be able to get more done and actually save money. Some can interpret that as having high standards for hiring VAs, but others might just assume that’s screening for basic understanding.

Now, if I were to do it myself, or any other expert for that matter, we could probably nail it in one go. One cycle, no fuss.

The problem is that I end up doing the work for them, which means we’re essentially paying VAs for the privilege of being their private tutor. 

We know exactly what we’re doing because we’ve done it a hundred times. And while you might pay more per hour for an expert, you save on all those repeated cycles, not to mention the headache and delays.

Why Revisions Are the Real Problem

We often hear from content VAs that repurposing a video into an article takes too much time.

Again, the correct question is not whether a VA should be spending 10 minutes or 10 hours on a video.

It’s whether they have sufficient competence to not need any revisions or iterations.

Let’s say we have a room full of folks who want to be surgeons, plus live patients who need surgery.  Should we allow these folks to operate for 10 minutes or 10 hours?

See how that’s the wrong question?

The litmus test for any candidate and for anyone on the team already is simply this:

Can they submit work that doesn’t need corrections?

If you look at the last few hundred QAs that I’ve personally done, the errors are mostly from:

1. Not including proper context
2. Lack of comprehension of the topic (#1 VA mistake)
3. Grammatical errors

I made two videos today with zero scripting, practicing, or editing. They are excellent, as is — no need to correct it, teach me basic concepts, or go through painful revision cycles. 

Took me 18 minutes total.

But, as we’ve seen, if someone who doesn’t understand that content attempts to process or refine it, it will likely require 4 to 5 hours of my time over dozens of iteration cycles to personally tutor them, fix errors, chase them down, etc.

Note that that 4 to 5 hours doesn’t generate any value, while the initial 18 minutes is in-depth and valuable — generating more business for us if we can get it live.  

As a failsafe, one of the videos that I just posted on Facebook and Instagram is already generating good attention for us:

Consider how I went through all 4 phases of the Content Factory myself in minutes — while we ask VAs to only do stages 2-4.

I noticed that Parker already turned that second video into an article — which is of excellent quality.

And I shared it (stage 4 of the Content Factory).

Notice how this article didn’t require the painful round-and-round waste that we’ve seen from most content specialists.  It’s that waste which is the most expensive — not the time it took to make the video or the time of a competent person to process into an article.

See the difference?

The Failure of Competency is a Failure in Practicing LDT

Doctors shouldn’t have to conduct multiple iterations on a simple surgery.

The reason they don’t is because they went to medical school, learned about anatomy, and have a reputation of excellence in their field. For our business, a reason for these iterations is a direct failure of taking the time to study the material VAs want to work on, while simultaneously not practicing active listening.

Instead of 25 iterations of 15 minutes to produce a single article, someone who has experience and practices the L in LDT can get this completed in under an hour instead of taking a full month to produce a single piece of content.

Quality Above All

It boils down to this: hiring skilled people might look more expensive on paper, but it’s actually way cheaper in the long run. You wouldn’t choose the cheapest heart surgeon, right? You’d want the one who can get it right the first time, even if they cost more per hour.

We believe in limiting iterations cycles because to increase our output, we need to reduce time spent iterating. It’s really that simple.

In the end, what matters is getting the job done right and fast, without going back and forth and ramping up those hidden costs.

So, next time you’re thinking about hiring for a task, remember the true cost of low competence. And if you’re a VA reading this, think about how you can reduce these iteration cycles by studying LDT and our existing training.

It’s not just about the hourly rate; it’s about how much it costs to actually get the job done right.