Employee, VA, Freelancer, Fractional Support, Consultant, AI… What Does Your Business Actually Need?

Growing businesses have never had more choice when it comes to getting support. You can employ somebody, hire a VA, find a freelancer, bring in fractional expertise, work with a consultant, use AI or automate the process altogether. In reality, most growing businesses will probably end up using a combination of several of these.

Having so many options is brilliant, but I also think it’s making the decision more complicated. I regularly hear business owners say, “I think I need a VA” or “I think we need to employ someone”, when what they’re actually saying is, “We’ve got too much going on and I need some help.”

Those are two very different things.

Before deciding who you need, I think you need to understand what problem you’re actually trying to solve. Do you have too much work? Are you missing a particular skill? Is there a temporary increase in capacity? Are senior people spending too much time on operational tasks? Do you need someone to challenge your thinking? Or is the business simply running inefficiently and creating work that doesn’t actually need to exist?

Until you know that, choosing the resource is a bit like choosing the medicine before you’ve worked out what’s wrong.

When does employing someone make sense?

There are plenty of circumstances where employment is absolutely the right decision. If you have a consistent volume of work, need somebody embedded within the organisation, want to develop that person over time and have enough ongoing responsibility to create a genuine role, an employee can give you valuable continuity.

You’re also building knowledge inside the organisation. Over time, that person understands your clients, culture, systems and ways of working. They become part of the business rather than an external resource, and that can be incredibly valuable.

The important thing is to establish whether you genuinely have a role, rather than simply a collection of jobs that need doing.

I see this particularly in smaller organisations. They know they need more capacity, so they start creating a job description. Administration goes on there, then perhaps social media because somebody needs to do it. They add the CRM, website updates, a little bookkeeping, events, email marketing and project support. Before long, they’re looking for one person who can somehow be an administrator, marketer, bookkeeper, events manager and digital expert.

You also need to consider the full commitment involved. The cost of an employee isn't simply their salary. Depending on the circumstances, there can be Employer National Insurance, pension contributions, paid annual leave, equipment, software, recruitment, training and management time. None of those things make employment a bad option, but they do mean it needs to be compared properly with the alternatives.

Where does a Virtual Assistant fit?

The VA industry has changed enormously, and there are now VAs specialising in everything from traditional administration to marketing, systems, finance and executive support. So I’m always cautious about treating “VA” as though it describes one particular set of skills.

Broadly, though, a VA can be an excellent option when you understand the work that needs doing and want somebody reliable to take responsibility for regular operational tasks. That could include inbox and diary management, customer administration, research, meeting support, CRM updates, document preparation or any of the countless recurring jobs required to keep a business moving.

The distinction I would make is whether you already understand the problem. If you know that customer enquiries need responding to every morning and you need somebody to take ownership of that process, brilliant. That is a defined requirement.

If what you actually mean is, “Our customer experience isn't working and I don't know why”, handing the existing process to somebody else might simply mean you’re outsourcing a broken process. You may need somebody to diagnose the problem first.

This is why I don't think outsourcing should ever simply be about getting rid of things you don't want to do. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do before handing something over is question whether it should still be done that way at all.

When is a freelancer the better option?

Freelancers are particularly valuable when you have a clearly defined piece of work that requires a specific skill. You might need a photographer for branding photos or a videographer for a campaign.

In those circumstances, you don’t need to employ that expertise permanently. You need access to it long enough to achieve a particular outcome. You brief the freelancer, they bring specialist expertise and they deliver the agreed work.

Where it can become more complicated is when a growing business accumulates lots of individual freelancers. You have one person looking after the website, another doing social media, somebody writing emails, another looking at the CRM and perhaps somebody else helping with events.

Everyone might be doing an excellent job individually, but somebody still needs to join everything together. Quite often that person remains the business owner, who suddenly finds themselves managing a collection of external suppliers rather than actually gaining the capacity they hoped outsourcing would create.

That doesn't make the freelance model wrong. It simply means the business needs to think about who has oversight of the bigger picture.

Where does fractional support come in?

This is the model I think more small and medium-sized organisations are going to become familiar with.

Fractional support essentially means accessing a portion of somebody’s expertise or capacity rather than employing that capability full-time. At senior level, businesses are increasingly familiar with fractional Finance Directors, Marketing Directors, HR Directors or Operations Directors, but the same principle can work across operational business support too.

Perhaps your organisation needs ten hours of administration each month, some email marketing, occasional website updates, CRM management and additional project support when something big is happening. You don’t necessarily have five jobs there. You have five different capability requirements.

This is much closer to the model we’ve developed at Ducks In A Row. Rather than expecting one person to somehow know everything, we have a multi-skilled team. Different pieces of work can therefore sit with people who have the relevant skills and experience.

For an SME, charity or CIC, recreating that breadth of expertise internally could be prohibitively expensive. Fractional support allows you to access smaller amounts of several skills without needing enough work to employ every specialist individually.

I sometimes call it business Pic 'n' Mix. You don't need to buy the entire sweet shop. You take the bits you actually need, and those requirements can change as the organisation develops.

A consultant should be doing something different

Consultancy sits somewhere else again, and I think this distinction is particularly important.

You don't generally bring in a consultant because you need another pair of hands. You bring them in because you need expertise, perspective, challenge or help understanding and solving a problem.

A good consultant should be asking questions before they start recommending solutions. What are you trying to achieve? What's preventing that from happening? What does the data tell us? What's already been tried? Where are the bottlenecks? What assumptions are being made? What is happening elsewhere in the organisation that might be contributing to the problem?

Sometimes a business owner comes to me convinced they need a particular solution and, after we start digging, we discover that the perceived problem isn't actually the underlying issue.

Perhaps they think they need more marketing because sales are slow. We look deeper and discover marketing is generating plenty of interest, but the customer journey is losing people before they buy. Spending more money generating leads would simply send more people into a process that isn't converting them.

That's why I increasingly believe diagnosis should come before delivery. Once you understand what is really happening, you can make a much better decision about whether the solution is a person, a process, technology or something else entirely.

Then AI arrived and changed the conversation

AI has added another option, and I think businesses need to be realistic about both its potential and its limitations.

There are tasks we would have paid humans to do several years ago that AI can now complete or dramatically accelerate. It can help analyse information, structure ideas, create first drafts, summarise meetings, interrogate data, document processes and speed up all sorts of everyday business activities.

I use AI and so does my team. Ignoring technology that can make us more efficient doesn't make much sense to me.

But I also don't subscribe to the idea that every task AI can technically perform should automatically be removed from a human.

There is a big difference between generating something and taking responsibility for an outcome. Businesses still need judgement, accountability, relationships, context and people who can spot when something doesn't quite feel right. AI only knows the context it has been given. A good person working inside your business gradually understands far more than what appears in a prompt.

For me, therefore, the more interesting question isn't, “Can AI replace this person?” It is, “How can the right person use AI to achieve a better outcome more efficiently?”

That combination of human expertise and technology is far more interesting.

Automation isn't quite the same thing

AI and automation are often talked about together, but I see them slightly differently. Automation is particularly useful when something happens repeatedly and follows predictable rules.

If somebody fills in a form and always needs to receive the same confirmation email, why does a person need to send it manually? If a new enquiry always needs to create a task in your project management system, that process can potentially happen automatically. If information is repeatedly being copied from one system into another, there may be a better way.

The challenge is knowing what not to automate.

A repetitive process with predictable rules is a strong candidate. A situation requiring judgement, empathy, nuance or relationship management probably needs more thought.

I've seen businesses outsource repetitive manual tasks that probably shouldn't require a human at all. I've also seen organisations attempt to automate things that desperately need a human being involved.

Neither is particularly efficient.

The answer probably isn't one of these

This is the part I think matters most. We need to stop thinking that growing a business means choosing between employing people or outsourcing or using technology.

A modern SME might have several employees who hold the core internal roles. It might use a VA for regular operational support, a freelancer for a specific creative project and fractional specialists in areas where it needs expertise but not a full-time salary. It might bring in a consultant at key points to challenge the strategy, while automation quietly handles repetitive processes and AI helps everybody work more efficiently.

All of those resources can form part of the same team.

In fact, I think this is where smaller organisations have an enormous opportunity. You don't necessarily need the budget to employ a huge internal team to access a huge breadth of capability anymore.

What you do need is to become much better at designing the resource around the work.

So before you write another job description, advertise for a VA, find a freelancer or buy the latest piece of AI software, start with the problem.

What are we actually trying to achieve? Is the requirement permanent or temporary? How frequently do we need this skill? Does the work require specialist expertise? Does it require human judgement? Is it predictable enough to automate? Are we looking for somebody to deliver the work, or do we first need somebody to help us work out what the right work actually is?

Once you've answered those questions, the resourcing decision becomes much clearer.

Sometimes the answer will be an employee. Sometimes it will be a VA, freelancer, fractional specialist, consultant, AI or automation.

Increasingly, though, I think the smartest answer for growing businesses will be:

a carefully designed combination of them all.