Compare five options on cost and scope: virtual assistant, EA, chief of staff, operations manager and bookkeeper. Plus a readiness checklist for founders.
Founders typically choose between five options, and the monthly costs vary widely: a part-time virtual assistant (£500 to £900 per month), a dedicated executive assistant (£2,350 per month through an agency, or £2,300 to £6,250 per month in-house), a chief of staff (£9,000 to £11,700 per month), an operations manager (£2,600 to £5,800 per month), or a bookkeeper (£100 to £700 per month). The right choice depends on what is actually draining your time. If it is calendar, inbox, and coordination, you need an executive assistant. If it is strategic execution across teams, you need a chief of staff. If it is process and systems, you need an operations manager. Most founders under 50 employees need the EA first, and many never need the others.
You have probably already started feeling the drag. The inbox is becoming unmanageable. A slide deck for the board is two days late. A flight got booked wrong. You know you need help. But the question is, what kind of help do you need?
That is where the confusion begins, because the market offers at least five distinct categories of support and calls most of them by interchangeable names. Helpful, I know.
The Asana Anatomy of Work Index, a global survey of over 10,000 knowledge workers, found that 60% of the average professional’s day is spent on coordination, status chasing, and task management rather than skilled or strategic work (Asana, “The Way We Work Is not Working,” 2023 (opens in a new tab)). For a founder, that figure is typically worse. Research by Harvard Business School professors Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria, who tracked 27 CEOs in 15-minute intervals over 13-week periods, found that executives allocate up to 55% of their unscheduled time to managing email alone (Harvard Business Review (opens in a new tab)).
Fortunately, you are in the right place. This guide does not cover when to hire. DonnaPro has a separate guide for that: see When to Hire an Executive Assistant. This guide will give you a specific decision framework on which role to hire once you have decided you need help, and, crucially, how to tell the difference between options that look similar on paper.
Virtual assistants, executive assistants, Chiefs of Staff, operations managers, and bookkeepers all have their uses.
But not every founder needs all five. By understanding what each one actually does, and where one stops and the next starts, you can prevent the most expensive mistake in this category: hiring the wrong role and concluding that delegation does not work.
| Role | What they own | Not their job | Typical UK cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Virtual assistant | Defined, repeatable tasks from your instructions | Judgement calls, owning a process | £15 to £35 per hour |
| Executive assistant | The operational layer around one leader | Strategy, managing teams, P&L | £28,000 to £75,000 a year in-house |
| Chief of staff | Cross-functional execution on the CEO’s behalf | Day-to-day admin | £108,000 average, £125,000 to £140,000 fully loaded |
| Operations manager | The systems the business runs on | Your calendar, inbox or time | £31,000 to £70,000 a year |
| Bookkeeper | Transactions, reconciliation, VAT, invoicing | Strategic finance, non-financial admin | £100 to £700 a month |
The five support options founders choose between, by what each role owns and what it costs in the UK.
What they do: Execute defined, repeatable tasks. Data entry, appointment scheduling, basic research, social media posting, travel booking from a template. A VA works from instructions you provide and checks back when the instructions run out.
What they do not do: Anticipate needs, manage relationships on your behalf, exercise independent judgement about priorities, or own a process end to end.
Typical cost: £15 to £35 per hour for a UK-based VA, dropping to £3 to £6 per hour for offshore providers (Remote Bob, 2026 UK VA Cost Guide (opens in a new tab)). Part-time retainers run around £500 per month for approximately 20 hours.
Best for: Founders with a clear, bounded set of tasks that do not require context about the rest of the business. If you can write the instruction once and it works every time, a VA can run it.
What they do: Own the operational layer around one leader. Inbox management with judgement calls on priority. Calendar architecture, not just booking but deciding what gets time and what does not. Travel planning, meeting preparation, follow-ups, stakeholder coordination, personal admin. A good EA operates with enough context to act without asking.
What they do not do: Set company strategy, manage teams, own a P&L, or run cross-departmental projects at scale.
Typical cost: £28,000 to £75,000 per year for an in-house EA in the UK, depending on seniority and location. London commands the top end; the Midlands starts at £28,000 (Robert Walters, 2026 UK Salary Survey (opens in a new tab)). Through a managed agency, expect £2,350 per month without the employer costs of NI, pension, recruitment fees, or equipment.
Best for: Any founder spending more than 10 hours a week on coordination, scheduling, inbox, and admin. This is the role that buys back the most time per pound spent for most leaders under 50 employees. For a deeper look at how an EA compares to a VA, see DonnaPro’s full comparison.
What they do: Act as a senior operational leader who works across the entire organisation on behalf of the CEO. They translate strategy into execution: running cross-functional projects, preparing board materials, managing stakeholder relationships, representing the CEO in meetings, and ensuring that decisions actually get implemented.
What they do not do: Handle day-to-day admin. A chief of staff who is booking flights and managing an inbox is misdeployed, and you are paying £108,000 or more per year for work a £35,000 EA could do better.
Typical cost: £108,000 per year average in the UK, up 30% since 2022 (Chief of Staff Collective, 2025). Total employer cost runs £125,000 to £140,000 once NI, pension, and bonuses are included.
Best for: Founders past the 50-person mark, or those managing multiple ventures, where the bottleneck is no longer time but execution. If strategy exists but is not getting implemented across teams, that is a chief of staff problem, not an EA problem. DonnaPro’s detailed breakdown of chief of staff vs executive assistant covers the salary gap and hiring sequence in full.
What they do: Own and improve the systems that keep the business running. Workflow design, vendor management, resource allocation, process documentation, performance metrics. They work across the company but their focus is on how things get done, not on the CEO personally.
What they do not do: Manage the CEO’s time, inbox, or calendar. They do not operate as a personal right hand. Their accountability is to the business’s operational efficiency, not to one leader’s bandwidth.
Typical cost: £31,000 to £70,000 per year in the UK, with an average of £46,500 (Indeed UK, 2026 (opens in a new tab)).
Best for: Businesses where the problem is not the founder’s time but the company’s processes. If projects stall because of unclear handoffs, if onboarding takes too long, if nobody knows who owns what, you have an operations problem, not an assistance problem.
What they do: Handle transaction recording, bank reconciliation, VAT returns, invoicing, expense management, and basic financial reporting. They keep the numbers accurate and current so you or your accountant can make decisions from clean data.
What they do not do: Provide strategic financial advice (that is an accountant or FD), manage your calendar, or handle non-financial admin.
Typical cost: £100 to £700 per month depending on transaction volume, or £20 to £55 per hour for project work (Hill Bookkeepers, 2026 UK Pricing Guide (opens in a new tab)).
Best for: Founders who are spending evenings on Xero, chasing invoices, or dreading VAT deadlines. If the financial admin is the single biggest drain and the rest of your coordination is manageable, a bookkeeper solves the specific problem at a fraction of the cost of a generalist hire.
The most common hesitation is not “do I need help?” but “can I afford it?” And the honest answer is: it depends on what your time is worth and what you are comparing against.
The arithmetic founders usually run is this: a full-time in-house EA in the UK costs £28,000 to £75,000 per year depending on seniority and location (Robert Walters, 2026 UK Salary Survey). Add employer National Insurance, pension contributions, equipment, office space, and management time, and the true cost is closer to £38,000 to £100,000 per year. That is a serious commitment for a company with 10 people and £500,000 in revenue.
But that is not the only option. The market has moved heavily toward part-time and managed models precisely because most founders at the 5-to-20-person stage do not need 40 hours a week of EA support. They need 15 to 25 hours, delivered by someone experienced enough to run without supervision.
A part-time managed EA through an agency typically costs £2,350 per month (see DonnaPro pricing for current figures). A part-time VA runs £500 to £900 per month but delivers a fundamentally different level of capability. A bookkeeper at £200 to £400 per month handles only the financial slice.
The question is not whether you can afford an EA. The question is whether you can afford the 10 to 20 hours a week you are currently spending on work that someone else could do better. If your effective hourly rate as a founder is £75 or more (and for most funded founders it is), then 15 hours a week of admin is costing you over £58,000 a year in lost strategic time. A part-time EA at £2,350 per month pays for itself the moment it frees up a third of that.
The hesitation is rarely about money alone. It is about not knowing what to hand over. Each role absorbs a different kind of work: an EA takes calendar, inbox, travel, meeting prep, expenses, and stakeholder coordination. A VA handles defined tasks like data entry, CRM updates, and document formatting. A chief of staff owns strategic execution, board reporting, and cross-functional projects. An operations manager builds and optimises processes, vendors, and systems. A bookkeeper covers transaction recording, reconciliation, VAT, and invoicing.
If your time goes mainly to the first category, you need an EA. If it splits across several, you likely still need the EA first, because freeing the founder’s time is the prerequisite for having the headspace to fix everything else. Our step-by-step guide on how to outsource your admin walks through exactly what to hand off and in what order.
This is not about revenue or headcount. It is about whether the work exists and whether you are prepared to let someone else own it. Tick the statements that apply to you.
The work exists:
You are ready to delegate:
Scoring: If you ticked three or more in the first section and two or more in the second, you have both the workload and the readiness for support. The role comparison above tells you which kind.
If you ticked several in the first section but few in the second, the workload is there but you are not yet ready to let go of it. That is worth being honest about, because hiring support and then micromanaging it wastes more time than doing the work yourself. DonnaPro’s guide on when to hire an executive assistant covers the readiness question in more depth, including a one-week delegation audit.
Sometimes the right answer is software, not a hire.
Scheduling tools (Calendly, SavvyCal) handle the back-and-forth of booking external meetings. They do not manage your internal calendar, prioritise what gets time, or prepare you for the meeting once it is booked.
AI writing and drafting tools produce first drafts in seconds. They do not know your stakeholders, remember that your board chair prefers bullet points, or follow up when someone has not replied. As Asana’s research showed, the bottleneck is rarely the drafting; it is the 60% of time spent on coordination around the drafting.
Accounting software (Xero, QuickBooks) automates categorisation and reconciliation. It does not replace a bookkeeper for complex VAT, multi-entity structures, or the discipline of keeping records current.
Software solves the mechanical slice. It does not solve the judgement, context, and ownership slice. Most founders who try to automate their way out of the problem find they have shifted the bottleneck from doing the work to managing the tools.
Find Out Which Role You Need
Explore more guides to help you hire, work with, and get the most from your executive assistant.
This guide draws on published salary data from Robert Walters (2026 UK salary survey), Indeed UK (2026 salary data for EA, chief of staff, and operations manager roles), and Hill Bookkeepers (2026 UK pricing guide). The productivity statistics come from Asana's Anatomy of Work Index (a global survey of over 10,000 knowledge workers) and Harvard Business School research by Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria on CEO time allocation. VA pricing is drawn from Remote Bob's 2026 UK cost guide. Role definitions reflect the standard market segmentation across UK and European recruitment, verified against published descriptions from Robert Walters, Indeed, and multiple specialist agencies.
All costs are indicative and will vary by location, seniority, and provider. Readers should verify current pricing directly with providers before making a hiring decision.
