how much to charge for virtual/personal assistant?

hagoonabear

Hi guys how much should I charge for being a personal/ virtual assistant is it per task or per hour and afterwards do I need to give them an invoice also any other advice would be great thanks!

jimmii

How you charge and how much you should charge depends on your experience and the quality of your work. Lots and lots of that type of thing in fiverr though. Or course you should issue an invoice or a receipt the business at the other end will need to be able to account for the expenditure and you will need it for your own accounts.

pedroeibar1

How long is a piece of string?

Skills? On-call times? Sector? Work to be done (quantity/complexity)? Per job/item or per period? etc. etc.

Ask a sensible question and you might get some sensible answers.

hagoonabear

It's really more like if they need groceries collected or bought I will do it, anything collected, any appointments needed I ll make them, presents needed to be bought and delivered, anything else too, just really personal assistant work

jimmii

Taskseveryday.com is a US site its $6.98 an hour. I guess you might get interest at €8/hour I think you would want to have built a reputation with people to be charging€10+. Not sure there is that much demand aren't we all a bit tight to spend in stuff like that!

hagoonabear

there is people out there though, I had a neighbour pay me €20 just to get her a stairgate while she was at work, also had set it up for her too though, but I will be targeting business owners and anyone really who works 9-5 or later

pedroeibar1

That's what grandparents are for!

jimmii

hagoonabear wrote: »

there is people out there though, I had a neighbour pay me €20 just to get her a stairgate while she was at work, also had set it up for her too though, but I will be targeting business owners and anyone really who works 9-5 or later

Do a bit of market research see what you come up with. There is definitely a market but how big it in a small city like Dublin would be the problem. Outside of Dublin I would think it would be impossible as a main source of income.

Mrs OBumble

OP, in the value-conscious end of the market, you'll be competing with the likes of Buzy Lizzie (Google her) who AFAIK still "employ" slaves ... err, workers, on Jobridge.

You need to think about your pricing in terms of trust and value: if people are giving you the keys to their house so you can drop groceries off etc, they may be willing to pay a bit more for the peace of mind that it's you personally providing the service not some intern that you've got on the cheap.

I'd think you might have a rate card that has categories of pricing, based on how much trust is involved. You might also think about pricing for the job, rather than per hour.

pedronomix

Easy to see the sales costs exceeding the revenues!!

jimmii

Never heard of buzy Lizzie before hire people on jobbridge and get paid for things they do unreal! I wonder what the % of interns to staff is there pretty high probably!

Trojan

VA is a very price-sensitive market, raise your rates too much and customers may decide to do the work themselves (hence people using any technique possible to reduce costs incl interns).

I'd try to build recurring income by offering X tasks for a monthly fee.

If you can specialise in a particular niche like book keeping, web management or social media, then go for it. You probably do need to offer multiple services (otherwise you're e.g. "a bookkeeper" not "a VA"), but I'd try and have one as the key focus and become known for that.

Mrs OBumble had a good point about trust, many VAs are given credit card numbers and online banking access - to get that you need to display a lot of trust indicators (look that up).

HTH.