The questions founders actually asked on recent DonnaPro sales calls, answered straight: how much help you need, data access, sharing an assistant, and more.
On our recent sales calls, founders kept asking the same questions before hiring an executive assistant. Almost all of them asked how much help they actually needed. Many also asked about data safety, sharing one assistant between founders, and whether they would end up managing another person. The short answers: most founders should start part time, at around 60 hours a month; delegated access keeps your passwords private; two founders can share one assistant; and the agency manages the assistant, not you.
One founder we spoke with had been thinking about hiring an executive assistant for seven years. He had never done it. He was not short of money, and he was not short of work to hand over. He was short of answers to a handful of questions that nobody had put to him plainly.
He is not unusual. Most founders come to us about a year later than they should have. The cost of that delay is real. A Gallup study of 143 Inc. 500 CEOs (opens in a new tab) found that leaders with high delegation talent generated about 33% more revenue than those with limited delegation talent, and grew their companies faster over three years.
Every agency publishes a list of tasks to delegate. This article is different. It collects the questions founders raised themselves, unprompted, on calls with DonnaPro, and answers each one directly, including the one where our answer is no. The quotes are real and anonymised. Where a question deserves a full guide, we link to it, starting with when to hire an executive assistant.
The answers draw on how DonnaPro runs: a six stage selection process, two weeks of training before any client work, more than 2,500 pages of operational frameworks behind every assistant, and 91% client retention at 60 days. Filip set out the thinking behind that model in The Next Web (opens in a new tab).
No, not if your assistant has a team behind them, although you will still need to share context in the first month.
This was the biggest blocker on our calls, and it was never about price. Founders who had tried assistants before described the same experience. A UK agency cofounder said of his previous virtual assistants: “they became, like, another to do list item for me to work on … every single action was just so many more questions that I just went, you know what, let me just do it.”
That happens when the assistant has nobody to ask except you. At DonnaPro, an account manager and a quality manager sit behind every assistant. They handle training, performance and cover, so questions about how to do the job go to them rather than to you.
What stays with you is context: how you like to be briefed, who matters, what can wait. Plan for the first few weeks to feel like an investment, and keep one short call a week. Without it, Filip says, the relationship turns into two pen pals exchanging letters.
Less than you might expect at first: Filip advises almost every founder to start part time, including founders who can afford full time.
The deciding factor is not company size. It is how much work you currently do yourself that you should not be doing. Going from no assistant to a full time one is a big jump, because you have not yet built the habits or the systems to fill that time well. One founder said he did not need someone “sitting there for 40 hours a week waiting for me to talk”.
DonnaPro’s part time package gives you around 60 hours a month from your assistant, plus 15 to 20 hours from the corporate team behind them. If one month is unusually busy, nothing changes; it evens out. When you consistently need more, DonnaPro raises it with you, does not backdate any charges, and agrees the change before billing differently. The full breakdown sits in our executive assistant cost guide.
Another founder offered a better measure than hours: “how much of a relief do you feel”. That is the real test of whether you have the right amount of help.
Start with the work that repeats every week and needs your judgement but not your time: inbox triage, the calendar, travel, and chasing replies.
Several founders told us they did not know how to use an assistant. A UK real estate cofounder said it plainly: “our main issue is that we don’t know how to use an EA.” That is normal, and it is fixable. A good assistant writes down each process as they take it over, so your way of working becomes documented rather than living in your head.
You also do not have to start with your inbox. A London consultancy founder told us: “I will not give them the email to manage, not the calendar … It’s only operations and project management and new projects.” That is a valid starting point. Trust tends to grow from there.
The same real estate founder had hired a driver before he ever considered an assistant: “I can work in the back of a car constantly … it frees up three or four hours a day.” An assistant works on the same principle, applied to everything that is not driving.
Use both: AI handles the volume of the work, and a person owns the outcome.
AI came up on many of our calls, usually raised by the founder. Most of them already used it, and one portfolio executive had found DonnaPro by asking an AI assistant for a recommendation. The same executive described where it falls short. Joining a call late from a hotel, he said: “Stuff is organized currently by AI and then it’s back to back and not enough space in between. The logistics is not considered.”
AI can draft, summarise and schedule. It cannot notice that a back to back day in two cities does not work, or decide which of two clashing meetings matters more to you this week. Filip’s summary in The Next Web: “AI handles the volume. Human judgment handles the quality.” DonnaPro assistants are trained on AI tools before they start work with a client, so you get both, which is also why AI is not replacing the role.
Yes, and on our calls it is one of the most common setups founders ask about.
Many of the calls involved two or three leaders who wanted to share one person. A UK engineering cofounder framed it well: the company needs one assistant “rather than either of us individually”.
It works best with a clear primary user. One prospect described his planned split as 75/25, and Filip told him that was easier to run than an even split, because priority conflicts mostly resolve themselves. Agree between you, before onboarding, whose request wins when two land at once. That keeps your assistant from refereeing. The whole arrangement, from splitting the time to the day a second assistant is due, is in our guide to sharing one executive assistant between founders.
Tell your account manager early, because a mismatch is cheaper to fix in week three than in month three.
Matching is not random. DonnaPro’s selection process includes written and live interviews, reference calls, personality assessments, and a check of how well each assistant’s profile fits the specific founder they will support. Most matches hold. When one does not, you tell your account manager and DonnaPro finds a better fit from within its own team. The fix is a conversation, not a new recruitment process on your side.
What you have already built carries over. Your preferences, recorded calls and written processes live in DonnaPro’s systems, not only in one person’s head, so a new assistant does not start from zero.
No. DonnaPro does not send you a shortlist to interview before you sign, and that is a deliberate choice.
This is the one question where our answer disappoints some founders, so here is the reasoning. A 20 minute interview tells you whether you liked someone. It does not tell you whether they will run your week well. By the time an assistant is matched with you, the DonnaPro team has seen them across a six stage process that runs for 30 days, plus two weeks of training. Choosing from one short call means guessing on less information than the matching team already has.
One founder pushed hard on this. Filip held the line and told him that if he wanted to pick candidates himself, a lower priced agency or a marketplace would suit him better. That is an honest answer, and for some founders it is the right one.
Every DonnaPro assistant is based in the EU, with the largest groups in Portugal, Slovenia, Poland and Spain.
The team also includes assistants in Croatia, Sweden, France and Romania. For UK founders, assistants in Portugal share your time zone, and the rest are one hour ahead. Because DonnaPro hires across the whole EU rather than one country, it can match on fit instead of taking whoever happens to be available locally.
On your market, the honest answer is that no assistant arrives knowing your industry. What they bring is how to run an executive’s week. The market knowledge comes from you in the first weeks, and it is written into a preferences file so it stays. The founders on our calls ran construction firms, private equity funds, property businesses, charities and software companies, across the UK, Ireland and mainland Europe.
Two founders agreeing who the primary user will be, before onboarding rather than after.
Your assistant gets the same access a direct hire would, so the real question is what sits behind them when they use it.
You never share your password. In Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 you grant delegated access instead. According to Gmail’s own help pages (opens in a new tab), a delegate can read, send and delete email for you, but cannot change your password or open your account settings. Your assistant also gets an email address on your own domain, and you can withdraw access at any time, which is how inbox, calendar and travel management is set up from day one.
The standard DonnaPro contract covers GDPR, intellectual property and confidentiality. All assistants are based in the EU, which means GDPR compliance is built into the employment relationship itself rather than bolted on through a contract clause. Roughly a quarter of clients also ask their assistant to sign the client’s own NDA, and the assistant can sign it personally.
For some founders the worry is not their own data but their clients’. If that is you, your IT team will usually want to review the setup around day seven to nine of onboarding, not before you sign. Our guide to virtual assistant security, GDPR and NDAs covers both in full.
Cover comes from the team behind your assistant, and your way of working is written down so it does not leave with one person.
One portfolio executive summed up the appeal: he did not want to coordinate anyone’s holidays himself. With DonnaPro, that coordination is not your job. For holidays and longer sick leave, DonnaPro arranges a replacement assistant.
If an assistant leaves, the handover is planned. Everything about how you work, from recorded calls to your preferences file and the processes your assistant has written down, lives in DonnaPro’s systems. Where possible, the new assistant shadows the outgoing one first, and your account manager and quality manager stay the same throughout.
The honest limit: a new assistant is never an exact copy of someone who has worked with you for six months. The routine work carries over within days. The instinct for your preferences takes a few weeks to rebuild. It is one of the clearest differences between an agency and a freelancer.
On the part time package, three at most, and an assistant never works more than 160 hours a month in total.
This is the unspoken worry behind any shared model: am I getting someone’s leftovers? The capacity is divided, not stretched. DonnaPro assistants work with DonnaPro full time and do not take on work outside it.
You might be matched with an assistant who is new to DonnaPro and has plenty of room, or with one who already supports a client and knows the system well. Either can be the right fit, and the matching team decides on fit rather than availability. If you are comparing providers, it is worth asking each one the same question: see how to choose an executive assistant agency.
Yes. Personal admin is part of the role, because a founder’s week does not split neatly into work and home.
Personal travel, appointments, renewals, family logistics and gifts all sit naturally with an executive assistant, much as they would with a virtual PA. So do the small things that slip when you are overloaded. One executive told us: “I missed the birth of a boy of one of my team members. She announced it in Slack, and then it was somehow eaten up in Slack, and I just didn’t see it. But this is just stuff that should not happen.”
The limit is physical presence. A remote assistant can book, arrange and chase, but cannot collect your dry cleaning. The list of things an assistant cannot take on is short, and most of it comes down to being physically there.
Many founders delay hiring an assistant because needing one feels like failing, and almost none of them say so.
One venture backed founder said it on a call with Filip, unprompted: “I’m a bit ashamed to have an executive assistant, you know, it feels like I cannot take care of everything myself, that gives me a little bit of sense of, I’m not enough.”
Filip’s answer was that many people feel this and very few admit it. He has felt a version of it himself. Running his previous agency, he often spent more time explaining tasks to his assistant than the time he was trying to save, and he concluded that he was the bottleneck, not her. The problem was never the person. It was the missing system around them.
Filip describes the decision to delegate as an identity shift more than a practical one. Founders who reach it tend to delegate quickly afterwards. Inside DonnaPro there is a line he repeats often: “If you don’t have an assistant, you are an assistant.” It is meant to be uncomfortable. A founder booking their own flights at midnight is not showing dedication. They are doing a job someone else should be doing, and paying for it with the work only they can do.
If most of these questions are yours too, the next step is a short call, not a long hiring process.
The founders on these calls were not short of reasons to hire. They were short of straight answers. If any question here is still open for you, ask it on a call with the DonnaPro team, and expect the same directness, including when the answer is no.
Book Your Free Strategy SessionThis article draws on recent recorded sales calls between DonnaPro and founders or senior executives. We included only questions the founder raised, not ones our team introduced. These conversations show a pattern, not a statistic, so we report what founders said rather than percentages. Every quote is anonymised and shared with a descriptor only. Details of DonnaPro’s service reflect how it runs at the time of writing and may change, so confirm anything important on your own call.
Sources reviewed
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