Businesses can tell they have a strong internal team when they not only meet their targets on time but also deliver high-quality work. However, it’s common for businesses to enter periods of increased work, often due to a growing client base or seasonal fluctuations. When work spikes to a certain level, even the most efficient team may struggle to keep up.
To keep up with the growing workload, businesses typically seek to expand their team size. Some may hire more internal staff, while others may turn toward managed virtual assistant services. Both have their advantages, but for any business to make the most of either, they need to know when internal hiring or managed VA service providers is the better choice.
How can a business tell if it should hire internally or partner with a VA service? We’ll answer that question along with how a managed VA service can help. Let’s start with some warning signs.
Signs Your Internal Team Is Stretched Too Thin
When the workload continues to grow, but headcount can’t keep up, it becomes a big challenge for your team. Here are some signs you shouldn’t ignore.
Declining Work Quality
The most obvious sign a team is stretched out is that the quality of its work starts to decline. Let’s say you run an e-commerce brand, and during the holiday season, orders double overnight, but the internal team stays the same size. As members of your team scramble to meet orders, mistakes creep in.
Incorrect items may be shipped, and customer inquiries may receive rushed responses. It’s a simple capacity vs demand problem. Catching up with excess work means they can’t give their best to each task. Quality suffers a decline, not because they are unskilled but because demand overwhelms their capacity.
Constant Firefighting
Firefighting refers to responding to situations gone wrong, aiming to mitigate the consequences and improve specific problematic situations, much like the real-life job of firefighters. Following the example above, you may find that your employees are constantly fielding urgent issues, such as refund requests for incorrect shipments or sudden website glitches due to heavy traffic.
While this is part of their expected roles, it diverts them from their primary focus, which should be enhancing the customer experience. When every day is just another 8 hours spent putting out fires, then chances are that your team needs more hands than it currently has.
Overworked Employees
It’s easy to know when your employees are overworked. First, you notice they work long hours, often by skipping breaks or staying longer than their agreed-upon work time, just to try to finish as much as possible on their desk. Workflows should be sustainable, but when it looks like everyone is just pushing through, then that’s a sign that you may be dealing with overworked employees.
Businesses with on-site teams may notice visible signs of fatigue among their team members. Tiredness from time to time is normal, but if it becomes an everyday occurrence, teams may want to consider expanding to ease the workload.
High-Value Employees Doing Repetitive Or Operational Tasks
Teams that are stretched thin often experience a mismatch between the expected roles of high-value employees and the tasks they are forced to perform due to the demands of the situation. Say you have an employee who handles strategy and partnerships. Their roles should keep them focused on marketing campaigns or vendor negotiations.
But because there are not enough hands to keep things moving, they are stuck responding to routine customer emails or chasing order confirmations. It may help in the moment, but it ultimately leads to missed opportunities and a decline in their results or overall impact. You are sacrificing high-value aspects of your business for tasks these people should never have to touch. Their expertise goes to waste, and business growth slows.
Slipped Deadlines
Trying to maintain quality while managing extra workload is how many teams mostly end up failing to meet deadlines. Deadlines move from being team commitments to constantly evolving targets. In an e-commerce setting, this may manifest as many customer tickets remaining unresolved.
If targets have always been a struggle for the team, it may be a different situation, as the team may need more training. However, if it’s sudden and happens as the team’s workload increases, then it’s clearly because the change in volume of work is a challenge for your team members.
When Hiring More Staff Isn't The Best Answer
Hiring more staff appears to be an obvious solution for the above signs, but that isn’t always the case. There are situations when hiring may not be the best, and here are some of them.
Recruiting And Training Is Slow
Adding new team members is not always a straightforward process, and depending on how it’s approached, it can also be costly. First, you must go through numerous prospects to determine which ones may fit into your operations. Then, from the selected ones, you conduct further interviews to narrow down the applicants to the most suitable ones. Following that is the onboarding process, which also requires a significant amount of time.
Always remember that recruitment is a risk. Just because you made the effort doesn’t mean you’ll be happy with the result. So there’s a possibility that you may not be satisfied with the input of the new hands at the end of the process. Not only would you have to disappoint the new hires by laying them off, but you’d also have spent time and resources you can’t recover.
Management Overhead Increases
Every new hire requires ongoing management, which drains leadership time. Consider the instructor training sessions and daily check-ins for the first few business days. Don’t forget to account for shadowing, reviews, and time spent correcting errors. It’s not always easy to notice how much time goes into training new team members, but after a month, it can add up to tens of hours.
When managers who should focus on high-level tasks take on extra responsibilities, it distracts them from their core tasks, which may involve scaling operations and guiding teams. When these tasks fail, it adversely affects the business in ways that may not be rectified by the effort put into training new employees.
Growth Rarely Stays Constant
A 200% spike in sales sounds like a good reason to bring in more people to the team, but is there any guarantee that this current heavy sales will become your business’s new normal? For many businesses, there are seasons when activities tend to peak. An e-commerce store, for instance, may see a high influx of customers during holiday periods or when offering discounts.
This kind of growth doesn’t require permanent employees or the effort needed to recruit them. You don’t want to have to lay off employees you invested so much into hiring after a few weeks or months, and keeping them means you’ll be overstaffed—so many employees and little to do—when things go back to normal.
Higher Fixed Costs Create Rigidity
When scaling, companies want to be careful with financial spending. Hiring new hands often means fixed salaries and certain benefits. However, scaling is usually a risk, and outcomes are not always certain.
For example, you’re expanding your services to another state. You aren’t sure if the demand will be as high in the new location as it is in your current location, but since you are willing to try, you need new hands to assist. The cost of recruiting may be worth it if business booms in the new branch. However, it may not be if it doesn’t.
From a financial perspective, you should not incur rigid fixed costs yet until you are certain of your new market. Hence, recruiting may not be the best approach.
Specialized Skills Aren't Always Needed Full-Time
Some additions only become necessary to your team from time to time. For instance, a growing e-commerce company may face a surge in order processing and customer support during peak seasons. Instead of hiring and training multiple full-time staff, a managed VA service can quickly ramp up a team, absorb the higher volume, and maintain consistent quality. Once demand stabilizes, capacity can be scaled back without the long-term overhead of permanent hires.
Businesses can conduct a quick research on how many hours of certain specialized skills they typically require at their current stage. If only a few hours or days of work are needed per month, using a managed service will be more cost-effective. Interestingly, for startups, many specialized skills rarely need full-time roles.
The Key Benefits Of Adding A Managed VA Partner
Faster Scalability
A managed service likely already has several VAs with the skill you possess, so they can simply assign one or more to your tasks, depending on your needs and agreement. Even when they don’t have resources ready for immediate assignment, they have a recruitment team and talent pool that helps them fill open positions faster. A service with a lot of experience working with businesses like yours makes things even easier, since they may not demand too much from you in terms of knowledge transfer.
This matters because hiring cycles can be long. During lengthy hiring processes, internal teams often remain stretched thin, and productivity continues to suffer. However, with a managed VA service involved, extra hands can be added to the team quickly while internal staff continue with their existing responsibilities. The contributions of both sides bring a balance that supports quick ramp-ups.
Less Oversight
Partnering with a managed VA service provider means you don’t need to manage every detail of work. The providers already have SOPs and rules guiding their operations, and they provide results based on these guidelines. All you need to do is confirm that you’re satisfied with their services, and from then on, they are responsible for the work going forward.
Unlike a VA agency, these service providers manage their own VAs. That way, your operations continue without your involvement. This will give your managers time for high-value work even as your team gets the extra human resources boost it needs.
Cost Efficiency
Managed services usually work on flat rates that cover the agreed scope of work. You only pay for the results delivered, without the burden of full-time salaries, benefits, and management overhead. Since many VAs come from popular offshore locations like India, Philippines, and Africa, even paying them competitively still costs significantly less than maintaining in-house staff.
Real-World Scenarios Where Managed VAs Help
To help you further understand how managed VAs help businesses with already existing in-house teams, we’ll share a couple of potential real-world scenarios with you.
First, let’s look at a content team that wants to publish more written content without sacrificing quality over the next few months. Also, this team already has a substantial amount of published content, but would love to update it by changing images and updating statistics to keep it current and relevant.
The roles they need VAs for include writers to create new content, image searchers to find more modern and relevant images, researchers to find replacements for outdated facts, and editors to assess the quality of each piece of content before it goes live. If they choose to work with a managed service like Klarecon, here’s what it will look like:
They will be able to retain their existing content team, who will continue to create new content with relevant slides and current images. Klarecon, however, will provide a separate content team that will create the extra amount of content, say 20 more articles, needed daily. This team will also find new images for the older articles and correct and update the facts in them.
At the end of the contract with Klarecon, the business executive will have achieved his goal of increasing output and updating old articles. They would not have spent money and time recruiting more hands. The team would not have experienced unnecessary overload during the spike period. Plus, they would have established a working relationship with Klarecon for future partnerships. Sounds beautiful, right?
Another real-world scenario? Let’s see a sales team that should focus on selling, but instead, they are spending hours on CRM updates and follow-ups. If this trend continues, sales will decline and profits will suffer. A recruitment process for new hands will take a long time and more money, so they outsource these tasks that distract the team from their core work to a managed VA service.
The team provided by the managed VA service handles tasks such as CRM entry, data cleanup, and routine follow-ups. Remember that this team is being managed and quality-assessed by a project or account manager, so no extra time or money is spent managing them. With this out of the way, the in-house sales team can focus on making more calls, sending personalized messages, and building stronger relationships—the things that actually drive more sales.
How To Decide If It's Time
How do you know it’s time to incorporate managed VA services for business growth? Asking yourself the following questions will help you determine it.
Ask: Are we spending more time managing work than growing the business?
Spending more hours juggling operational tasks than on innovation and building the necessary relationships for business growth is not a good sign. In this case, it’s time to consider outsourcing to a managed VA service for the much-needed help.
Ask: Is our internal team doing work below their skill level just to keep up?
It’s a cry for help when team members start dipping below their skill level to meet targets and deadlines. Their skills are being underutilized, and real growth is stunted. To get them back to their skill level, a managed VA service can take over the basic tasks.
Ask: Are we saying “no” to growth opportunities because we lack execution capacity?
Growth can come at any time, and when it does, your execution capacity might become a blocker. When you have to pass on launching new products or entering a promising partnership because there isn’t enough bandwidth to do so, then your business can benefit from some external help.
Think Partnership, Not Replacement
Managed virtual assistant services pose no threat to a reliable internal team. Instead, they help the internal team stay more productive and avoid overworking, while also enabling the business to achieve its objectives and save on unnecessary costs. They serve when needed and bow out until they are needed again.
Smart companies recognize this and combine both. They have their own internal experts for high-value work and tasks that must be performed daily. Then, they let managed VA services step in to help when they are overwhelmed or scaling with caution. This way, they don’t have to go through a complete recruitment cycle every time there is a spike in work.
If you find your business facing the challenges mentioned above, it’s time to bring in a managed VA service provider. Start by identifying a few repeatable tasks and testing the partnership. As time passes, you can know if they work for you, and pass on more work to them, freeing your business to thrive without overwhelming your internal team.
Hiring freelancers from platforms like Upwork is another option businesses may explore. We have provided a comparison between our model and that of Upwork in the article, Upwork vs Klarecon, to help businesses determine which is better for them.
