For years, “virtual assistant” was the term I used. It’s the term almost everyone uses. Type “I need help with my business” into a search bar and it’s usually one of the first suggestions that comes back.
Here’s the problem with it: it doesn’t actually tell you anything.
A virtual assistant could mean someone who answers your email. It could mean someone who builds your website. It could mean data entry, social media scheduling, bookkeeping, or literally anything else that can be done from a laptop.
The term has stretched so wide over the years that it’s stopped describing a job and started describing a category — and categories don’t tell you what you’re getting.
If you’ve ever hired a VA and had it not quite work out, this might be why. Not because the person wasn’t skilled. Because neither of you was entirely sure what you were hiring for.
You knew you needed help. You didn’t necessarily know what kind.
So you searched for the closest available label, hired someone under it, and hoped the details would sort themselves out.
Sometimes they do.
Often, what you actually needed was more specific than the label allowed for — someone to document your onboarding process, someone to research and compare new software, someone to organize years of client records into something searchable — and “virtual assistant” was never going to surface that on its own.
I ran into this from the other side.
I’d call myself a VA because it was the fastest way to explain that I helped with business tasks remotely. But it kept attracting the wrong conversations — people looking for someone to manage their inbox, when what I actually do is closer to operations: systems, documented processes, research, organization, and the recurring administrative work that keeps a business standing when the owner is busy running it.
Same skill set. Wrong label.
The mismatch wasn’t anyone’s fault — it’s just what happens when an entire industry shares one word for a dozen different jobs.
Start With the Work, Not the Job Title
If you’re trying to figure out what kind of help your business actually needs, start by looking at the work that’s taking up your time — or the work that keeps getting pushed aside.
Is information scattered across files and folders?
Are processes living in your head instead of being documented?
Is research eating up hours you don’t have?
Are important administrative projects sitting on your to-do list week after week?
Are you recreating the same processes because there’s no system behind them?
Those answers tell you much more about the kind of support you need than a job title ever will.
Someone who needs daily inbox management needs a very different kind of support from someone who needs their operations documented and organized. Neither is better or more valuable. They’re simply different jobs.
Defining the work first gives you a much better chance of finding the right person to do it.
What I Call My Work Now
These days, I describe what I provide as Administrative & Operations Support.
It’s a better description of the work I actually enjoy doing and where I’m most useful: researching and organizing information, documenting processes, creating practical business resources, organizing systems, and handling the administrative projects that tend to sit on the back burner while someone is busy running their business.
It’s still remote support. And depending on how broadly you define the term, you could certainly still call it virtual assistance.
I’m not trying to reinvent the industry or argue that there’s anything wrong with being called a virtual assistant.
I just think you deserve to know more about what you’re hiring than where the person happens to be sitting when they do the work.
And if you’re trying to figure out what kind of help your business actually needs, the label probably isn’t going to get you there. The work will.
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