The phrase "executive assistant" sounds corporate. For a solo founder it usually isn't — what you actually need is a thinking partner for the operational tax of running a business. Calendar, email, vendor calls, expense reconciliation, travel logistics, contractor coordination, the 50 small tasks per week that aren't the work but stop the work from happening.
I've been the EA in this kind of relationship for several years and I've watched the same pattern repeat: founders hire too late, hire wrong, then under-use the person they hired. The whole arrangement falls apart in 6 months and the founder concludes "EAs don't work for me." The arrangement does work; the hire was the problem.
This page is about how to do it right.
When you're ready to hire an EA
You're ready when at least three of these are true:
- You have at least 5 hours per week of repetitive operational work you could describe to someone else: scheduling calls, managing recurring vendors, drafting standard responses, processing expenses, tracking client deliverables.
- You can list specific things you'd give up if someone else owned them, not just "I'm busy." If you can't name the things, an EA can't help.
- You're losing more than $500/month of your own time to operational stuff that someone else could do for $500/month. The math is real and brutal.
- You can imagine someone else replying to certain emails on your behalf and not feel weird about it. If you can't, you'll micromanage and the EA won't save you anything.
- You have at least 3 months of runway to absorb the cost of training someone in. The first 4–6 weeks of an EA hire are net-negative for you. After that the math turns positive.
If fewer than three of those are true, you don't need an EA. You might need a virtual assistant for one-off tasks (different role, see below), or you might need to delete some of the work entirely.
EA vs VA — the difference matters
These get used interchangeably and they shouldn't be:
Virtual Assistant (VA). Hands. Does what you tell them, the way you tell them. Best at clearly-scoped repetitive tasks: data entry, simple research, manual processing, social media posting. Hourly rate $5–$15 USD globally. Right tool when you have a clear, repeatable task and you just need someone to do it.
Executive Assistant (EA). Hands AND judgment. Owns the outcome of an area of your work — your calendar, your inbox, your travel — and makes decisions inside that area without asking. Hourly rate $20–$50 USD for native-English EAs internationally, $50–$120 in onshore markets. Right tool when you need someone to take real ownership and you want to actually disappear from the day-to-day of that area.
The mistake most founders make is hiring a VA for $8/hr and giving them EA work. The VA does it badly because they don't have the context or authority. The founder concludes "remote help doesn't work" and goes back to doing it themselves.
What I do is EA work — owning outcomes, making decisions, communicating in your voice. Different price, different value.
What I actually do as an EA
Specific examples from real client work, with details changed:
Inbox triage and drafting. I get into your inbox every morning, archive newsletters and noise, flag the 5 emails that actually need you, and draft responses to the next 10–20 in your voice. You spend 20 minutes a day on email instead of 90.
Calendar ownership. I book and reschedule on your behalf, defending your focus hours, batching calls into specific days, and surfacing conflicts before they happen. You stop being the bottleneck on every "find a time" thread.
Travel logistics. Flights, hotels, ground transport, restaurant bookings, visa requirements, expense pre-loading. I handle the whole arc, you just show up and travel.
Vendor & contractor coordination. Your bookkeeper, your designer, your three contractors, your hosting company — I become the relay so you're not the one reminding everyone to do their job.
Light project management. Tracking deliverables across vendors, chasing late work, keeping a status doc you can glance at on Sunday night to know where everything stands.
Expense reconciliation. Receipts collected, categorised, reconciled with bank/card statements, exported to your accountant monthly. No more receipt-shoebox panic at tax time.
Personal-life adjacent stuff. Birthday gifts, gift cards for clients, restaurant reservations, dog groomer bookings. The boundary on this is whatever you want it to be — some clients keep work and personal strictly separate, others blend them.
Things I deliberately don't do without specific arrangement:
- Direct customer support for your business (that's a different role)
- Bookkeeping or actual accounting (I prep for your bookkeeper, I don't replace one)
- Sales calls or anything billable (that's misalignment of incentives)
- Legal document drafting (you need a paralegal or lawyer)
Pricing — the honest numbers
$50 USD/hr hourly with weekly time reports, or $500/mo for the Lead Steer 10-hour package which mixes EA work with my Dev and L3 Tech work however you need.
Most EA-leaning clients use about 8–15 hours per week — so if your need is 8 hours/week, it's $50 × 8 × 4.3 = ~$1,720/mo hourly, or two retainers stacked. If your need is closer to 4–5 hours/week, the retainer is the right shape because you don't waste hours.
Compare honestly:
- Onshore EA agency in US/UK/AU: $40–$90/hr. Same quality, you're paying for proximity and tax residency.
- Marketplace VA from PH/IN: $5–$15/hr. Cheaper but you'll spend 10+ hours a week directing them, which often eats the savings.
- Full-time in-house EA: $50,000–$80,000/yr (US/AU) or £35,000+ (UK), all-in with benefits. Worth it once your needs exceed about 25 hours/week, not before.
The right fit is usually whatever scales with your actual hours of need. My retainer makes that math clean.
The "training a new EA is exhausting" problem
This is the real reason most founders give up on EAs. The first 4–6 weeks are punishing — you have to teach them how you work, what your voice sounds like, who matters in your inbox, what's an emergency vs noise.
What I do to compress this:
A "founder's manual" doc built in the first two weeks. Your communication preferences, recurring vendors, calendar rules, who matters in your network, what counts as an emergency. Living document, updated as we work.
Recorded Loom walkthroughs of every recurring task you do, captured the first time we do it together. So when I do it the second time alone, I'm copying your exact pattern.
Weekly sync (15 min) in the first month, then biweekly, then monthly once we've found the rhythm. Not a status meeting — a "what's confusing, what should change" meeting.
A specific list of decisions you've delegated ("yes to any meeting under 30 min", "no to any speaking gig under 200 attendees", "always book aisle seat", "always reply to vendor X within 24h"). The list grows over time as we surface decisions you've actually been making and just hadn't named.
The goal is that by week 8, I'm making the right decision 90% of the time without asking you. That's what good EA work looks like — and it doesn't happen by accident.
How to start
The first conversation is free, 30 minutes. Bring:
- An honest list of what eats your time per week
- One specific area you'd most like to hand off (calendar? inbox? travel?)
- Your monthly time-vs-money budget for this
I'll tell you whether I think it's a fit, what I'd start with, and what to expect in the first 60 days.
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This is the service page for hiring me as an EA. The deeper guide on offshore hiring generally — including hiring me — is Offshore Hiring for Western SMBs: The Honest Guide.