Every trades owner hits the same wall. You are the one answering the phone, sending quotes, chasing invoices, and posting on Facebook, and you are doing it from the truck between jobs. The work that grows the company gets done last, if at all.
A virtual assistant is the cheapest way over that wall. Not a magic fix. A person, usually remote, usually part-time, who takes the office work off your plate so you can sell and run crews. In our experience, an owner who hands off the right ten hours a week gets back a full day of selling time.
The trick is picking the right ten hours, writing them down so someone else can do them, and managing a person you will probably never meet in person. Here is how we set that up for the companies we work with.
What a virtual assistant can own
Start with the list of things you do that do not need your license, your judgment on price, or your face in front of a customer. For most trades companies, that list looks like this.
Phones and inbound messages
A VA can answer the main line during business hours, take the details, book the estimate, and text you a summary. They can also work the web form and Google Business Profile messages. Speed matters more than polish here. A VA who replies in five minutes beats an owner who replies at 8 pm.
Scheduling and confirmations
Booking estimates, moving jobs when it rains, sending day-before reminders, calling the customer who did not confirm. If you use Jobber, they live in the calendar and the client hub. We cover the setup in the Jobber setup checklist.
Quote follow-up
This is the single most valuable job on the list. Every quote over 48 hours old with no answer gets a text or a call. The VA works the list every morning. A good VA with a clear script will recover jobs you had written off.
Invoicing and collections
Sending invoices the day the job closes, applying payments, sending the 7, 14, and 30 day reminders, and calling anything past 45 days. For property management accounts, they handle the vendor portal uploads and the PO matching.
Social posting and reviews
Posting the before-and-after photos your crew already takes. Sending review requests. Drafting review replies for you to approve. A VA cannot make your company interesting, but they can make it consistent, and consistent wins local search.
Vendor portals and compliance paperwork
If you work for property managers, you know the portals. Insurance certificates, W-9s, annual renewals, uploading the same COI to four different systems. A VA can own every bit of it. See the vendor compliance checklist for what they need to track.
What stays with the owner
Handing off the wrong things will cost you more than keeping them. Keep these:
- Pricing. The VA sends quotes you have built or approved. They do not set numbers.
- Anything with a property manager about damage, a complaint, or a contract.
- Hiring and firing crew.
- Cash decisions. Which vendor gets paid this week is yours.
- The first conversation with any new commercial account.
- Anything that requires being on site.
A rule that has served us well: the VA can say yes to anything already in the SOP and must say “let me check and get back to you” to everything else. That one sentence protects you from most of the ways this goes wrong.
How to write an SOP a stranger can follow
Most owners have never written a procedure. They have everything in their head and get frustrated when a new hire cannot read their mind. Here is the format we use. One page per task.
- Task name. “Follow up on open quotes.”
- When. “Every weekday at 9 am.”
- Where. “Jobber, Quotes tab, filter Awaiting Response, sort oldest first.”
- Steps. Numbered, one action each. “Open the quote. Check the last activity date. If over 2 days and no follow-up logged, send Text 1 from the script sheet. Log it as a note on the quote.”
- Scripts. The exact words. Not “send a friendly text.” The text.
- Stop rules. “If the customer says no, mark the quote Archived and add the reason. If they ask about price, do not negotiate. Reply with Script 4 and flag the owner.”
- What done looks like. “Every quote in the filter has a note dated today.”
Record a screen video of yourself doing the task once while talking through it. Ten minutes on a screen recorder is worth more than three pages of text. Pair the video with the one-pager and your SOP is done.
Example script sheet entry for quote follow-up, Text 1:
“Hi [First name], this is [VA name] with [Company]. Wanted to make sure the quote for the [service] at [address] came through. Anything you would like us to adjust?”
Tools to give them
Keep this tight. Every tool you add is another login to manage and another place for something to get lost.
| Need | Tool type | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Jobs, quotes, invoices | Jobber | Give them a limited user role, not admin |
| Phone | VoIP app with a business number | Never their personal cell |
| A company address, not a forward | They need to send as the company | |
| Scripts and SOPs | A shared doc folder | One folder, one owner, no duplicates |
| Daily check-in | Chat app or a shared task board | One channel, not five |
| Passwords | A password manager with shared vaults | Never a spreadsheet of logins |
Set up the accounts before they start. A VA who spends their first week asking for access is a VA you are paying to wait.
How to manage someone you have never met
This is the part owners get wrong. They either micromanage every text or disappear for two weeks and then get mad about what was missed. Here is the middle.
Daily. A three-line end-of-day message from the VA. What got done, what is stuck, what needs you. Two minutes to read.
Weekly. A 20-minute call. Review the numbers: leads handled, quotes followed up, invoices sent, anything past due. Walk through one SOP together and fix what is unclear.
Monthly. Look at outcomes, not activity. Did close rate on quotes go up? Did days-to-pay go down? Did you get more reviews? If not, the SOP is wrong or the person is wrong. Fix the SOP first.
Give them the why. A VA who knows that a quote followed up on day 2 closes far more often than one followed up on day 10 will follow up on day 2 without being told twice.
Start them on one task. Get it right for two weeks. Then add the next one. Handing a new VA six SOPs on day one gets you six half-done tasks.
What it costs
Rates depend on where the person is, how many hours, and whether they speak with customers on the phone. These are ranges we have seen, not quotes.
- Offshore, English-speaking, 20 hours a week, back-office only: $600 to $1,200 a month.
- Offshore or nearshore, phone-capable, 20 to 30 hours a week: $1,000 to $2,000 a month.
- US-based, part-time, phone-capable: $1,500 to $3,000 a month.
- Full-time US office manager, for comparison: $3,500 to $5,000 a month plus taxes and benefits.
Add tools, usually under $100 a month on top of what you already pay for Jobber. Add your own time for the first month, 3 to 5 hours a week to train and correct.
A good VA on quote follow-up alone should recover two or three jobs a month that would have gone quiet. For most trades, that pays the whole bill.
Pairing a VA with an agent
The best version of this is not a VA alone. It is a VA plus an AI agent that does the mechanical work at all hours and hands the exceptions to the VA in the morning. The agent sends the first reply at 9 pm. The VA calls the lead at 8 am. We lay out that split in what an AI agent can actually do for a field service business.
Where Intrepid fits
We write the SOPs, set up the tools, and place VAs for trades companies, usually alongside an agent so the VA spends their hours on the calls that need a person. If you want to see what your first three hand-offs should be, read about our agentic services or book a call. We will tell you if a VA is not the right next hire.