Productivity Hacks: Tasks Every Founder Should Hand Off to a VA

Every startup founder and business owner knows the feeling – an endless to-do list, back-to-back meetings, and never enough hours in the day. Yet trying to do everything yourself is a recipe for burnout and bottlenecks. The smartest entrepreneurs have a secret weapon: they delegate routine work to virtual assistants and free themselves to focus on growth. In this post, we’ll explore why handing off tasks to a Virtual Assistant (VA) is one of the best productivity hacks, what tasks you should be delegating, and how to do it effectively. Along the way, we’ll highlight MySigrid – a premium virtual assistant partner – and share real-world examples of founders who scaled their productivity with a VA. Let’s dive in!

The Case for Delegating to Virtual Assistants

Founders often wear too many hats, juggling everything from admin to marketing to operations. Research shows this comes at a cost. In fact, a recent survey found that entrepreneurs spend on average 36% of their work week on low-value administrative tasks like invoicing, data entry, and scheduling. That’s over a third of your time lost to busywork! Small business owners lose about 1.5 hours every day to unproductive tasks, adding up to more than three weeks of lost productivity a year. Imagine reclaiming all that time to strategize, innovate, or simply recharge.

Delegation isn’t just about saving time – it drives better business outcomes. Those who label themselves “expert delegators” are significantly more likely to have seen revenue and profit growth compared to peers who struggle to delegate. One survey revealed 82% of founders who delegate effectively saw business growth, versus only 66% of those who don’t delegate well. Their profit margins followed a similar trend. Delegation even correlates with better work-life balance: entrepreneurs who outsource tasks report lower stress, more exercise, and more frequent vacations away from work. The message is clear – letting go of the small stuff can propel both your business and your well-being.

Virtual Assistant vs. Executive Assistant: What’s the Difference?

You might be wondering how a virtual assistant vs. executive assistant compare. In truth, a skilled VA can perform many of the same functions as a traditional executive assistant – managing your calendar, handling correspondence, booking travel – but they work remotely and often at a fraction of the cost. An in-house executive assistant typically commands a full-time salary (plus benefits and office space), which can easily top $60,000–$75,000 per year. In contrast, when you hire a virtual assistant, you can engage them part-time or on flexible plans, paying only for the hours or services you need. There’s no overhead for health insurance, equipment, or idle downtime – making VAs a cost-effective alternative to a full-time employee.

Modern virtual assistant services also blur the line between “virtual assistant vs. full-time employee.” High-end VA providers like MySigrid actually hire and train their assistants as full-time employees of their company, then assign them to work for you. This means you get a remote executive assistant fully dedicated to your needs, but without having to hire them directly. You avoid the HR headaches while still building a long-term working relationship. Plus, virtual assistants often bring diverse skills (marketing, project management, tech tools, etc.) that a single executive assistant might not possess. And if your VA is backed by a larger team (as MySigrid provides), you gain access to specialists and a 24/7 backup team for the price of one – something an individual hire can’t match.

In short, virtual assistant services offer the best of both worlds: the personalized support of an executive assistant combined with the flexibility and scalability of outsourcing. It’s no surprise that around 70% of medium-to-large businesses now utilize virtual assistants (human or AI) to enhance efficiency – a trend equally accessible to scrappy startups and solo founders.

Top Tasks Every Founder Should Hand Off to a VA

One of the biggest hurdles for founders is knowing what to delegate. You might suspect “I’m the only one who can do this” – but chances are, many of your daily tasks can be handled expertly by a virtual assistant. Here are some of the top categories of tasks you should consider handing off to a VA:

1. Administrative & Calendar Management Tasks

Administrative tasks are often the first thing to outsource because they’re necessary but time-consuming. This includes inbox triage, scheduling meetings, calendar management, travel planning, data entry, and document organization. These routine duties eat up hours that could be spent on strategy or product development. A capable VA (often functioning as your remote executive assistant) can manage your email inbox – sorting and prioritizing messages, drafting replies, and weeding out the spam – so you only see the important stuff. They can also take over your calendar, booking appointments and coordinating calls across time zones so you never double-book or miss a meeting.

Real-world example: MySigrid’s co-founder Paul Østergaard relies on his virtual executive assistant to manage his Office 365 calendar, schedule meetings with clients and team members, handle travel bookings, and even coordinate his family’s schedules. During the years he was scaling a previous company, Paul’s VA (named Sigrid) essentially ran his life behind the scenes, handling 250+ days of travel per year and all the associated logistics. By entrusting scheduling, travel arrangements, and even expense reporting to his assistant, Paul freed up countless hours. “I only have so many productive hours in a day, and I like to know that I am always 100% focused on the most important things,” he says. Delegating the busywork meant he “gets a lot more done than the average person” and has time for creative thinking, family, and health as well. This is the power of outsourcing administrative support – it unshackles you from the minutiae.

Common admin tasks to delegate: managing email and filtering spam, scheduling meetings and calls, maintaining your calendar, booking travel (flights, hotels, transport), processing expense receipts, preparing basic reports, data entry into CRMs or spreadsheets, organizing digital files, and handling personal errands (like sending gifts or scheduling appointments). A remote executive assistant can even handle personal calendar items (doctor’s visits, family events) so your work and life are in harmony. Founders who hand off these tasks to a VA often describe it as “getting an extra pair of hands” or even a few extra hours in their day.

2. Marketing, Content & Social Media Tasks

In the digital age, a strong marketing presence is vital – but managing it can be a full-time job on its own. Why not delegate these marketing tasks to a virtual assistant? Many VAs specialize in areas like content creation, social media management, basic design, and SEO research. If you’re an entrepreneur trying to maintain a blog, send newsletters, and post on multiple social platforms, a VA can be a lifesaver. They can draft blog posts or articles (even repurpose your ideas into content), design and schedule social media posts, respond to comments, and ensure your brand stays active online. For example, a virtual assistant for content creation might handle researching blog topics, editing drafts, and uploading posts to your website. A virtual assistant for social media management can create a content calendar, design graphics in Canva, and engage with your followers daily.

Real-world example: Allied Offsets, a financial services startup (and MySigrid client), discovered the benefit of delegating marketing coordination to a VA. The founder brought in a MySigrid virtual assistant to handle marketing management and task coordination – covering things like social media updates, email campaigns, and client follow-ups. The result? The company saw a noticeable improvement in customer satisfaction and user engagement metrics after integrating the VA into their team. By having a dedicated assistant ensuring quick responses and consistent marketing touchpoints, Allied Offsets delivered a better experience to their own customers without overburdening their core team. This illustrates how outsourcing marketing support to a VA isn’t just a time-saver – it can directly boost your audience engagement and brand presence.

Other marketing tasks to outsource: managing your content calendar, drafting social media captions, scheduling posts via tools (Buffer, Hootsuite), monitoring analytics, coordinating with designers or freelancers, doing keyword research for SEO, running basic email marketing campaigns, updating website content, or even creating slide decks for webinars. Founders of e-commerce businesses and digital agencies often use virtual assistants to handle product listings, update online store content, respond to online reviews, or manage influencer outreach. Handing off these repetitive marketing tasks means you can focus on high-level marketing strategy and creative direction, rather than the daily grind of execution.

3. Operations, Customer Support & Project Management Tasks

Beyond admin and marketing, think about the operational tasks that keep your business running. Many of these can be delegated to a capable virtual assistant or remote team. For instance, customer service is a prime area to outsource – a VA can respond to customer inquiries, provide basic tech support via email or chat, process orders and returns, and ensure your clients get timely answers. If you run a SaaS or e-commerce company, a trained VA can serve as a frontline customer success rep, escalating only the most complex issues to you. This not only saves you time, but also improves customer satisfaction by providing prompt service.

VAs can also assist with sales operations and CRM management. Consider handing off tasks like lead generation research, routine sales follow-up emails, or managing your CRM data. A great example comes from a MySigrid client in the telecom industry: the CEO of a telecommunications company engaged a VA to help manage new sales leads and follow-ups. The virtual assistant researched potential prospects, monitored responses to email campaigns, and even replied to inquiries or booked meetings for interested leads. Thanks to the VA’s diligence, no inbound lead slipped through the cracks – if a prospect replied at 9 PM, the assistant had a response out or a meeting scheduled before the next day. The CEO noted that the VA always finished tasks ahead of deadlines and was ultra-responsive to both the clients and the internal team’s needs. By having a VA acting as a sales development rep, the company was able to increase its sales pipeline without overloading their core team – a clear win-win.

Project management for startups is another area where a VA can lighten your load. Founders often juggle multiple projects – product launches, investor updates, hiring, and more. A detail-oriented VA can serve as a project coordinator: updating project plans, sending reminders about deadlines, documenting meeting notes, and following up with team members on their tasks. In fact, some entrepreneurs specifically hire virtual project managers to oversee initiatives and keep everyone on track. For example, a boutique consulting firm (another MySigrid client) brought on a virtual executive assistant to act as a client service coordinator – essentially a project manager for client communications. The VA regularly contacted the firm’s investors and partners, scheduling quarterly calls, sending weekly update emails, and even remembering personal touches like birthday messages. This consistent, high-touch approach gave the small firm a “white-glove service” reputation usually associated with larger companies that have whole departments for client relations. Meanwhile, the CEO could focus on investment strategy, knowing the operational follow-ups and client outreach were handled seamlessly in the background.

Lastly, don’t overlook general research and data tasks. Need a market analysis, competitor research, or a list of potential investors? A VA can gather and summarize that information for you. Need your financial data organized or an Excel report updated weekly? A VA can take it on. These operational support tasks might not be glamorous, but they are essential to keep things running smoothly – and outsourcing them gives you back valuable time and brainpower.

Summary of tasks to delegate in operations: customer support emails and calls, managing online chat inquiries, updating CRM entries, bookkeeping or expense tracking (many founders use VAs to reconcile accounts or work with their accountant), hiring coordination (scheduling interviews, screening resumes), supplier/vendor communications, project management assistance (updating Asana/Trello boards, status tracking), and online research for any business need. If it’s a process that can be documented and doesn’t require your personal expertise, there’s a good chance a competent virtual assistant can handle it.

Best Practices for Delegating Tasks Effectively

Handing off your work to someone else – especially a remote team member – can feel daunting at first. Here are some best practices for delegation to ensure your partnership with a VA is productive and smooth:

• Identify High-Impact Tasks to Outsource: Start by listing all the tasks you handle in a week. Mark the ones that are repetitive, time-consuming, or outside your core strengths. These are top candidates to delegate. As the saying goes, “focus on what only you can do – delegate the rest.” Whether it’s managing your inbox, formatting slides, or doing research, outsource work that doesn’t require your personal touch. This will instantly free up hours. (Tip: If you’re unsure, try tracking your time for a week to see where it really goes. You might be shocked how much is eaten by admin and not strategy.)
  
  
• Document and Communicate Clearly: One secret to delegating tasks effectively is providing clear instructions and expectations up front. Take a bit of time to write SOPs (standard operating procedures) or record a quick Loom video explaining how you want a task done. Share necessary files, templates, or login access your VA will need. In the beginning, more detail is better – you can always loosen the reins later once they understand your style. Effective delegation is a two-way street: encourage your VA to ask questions and clarify doubts. Many entrepreneurs find that investing time in training their assistant early on pays off massively in the long run.
  
  
• Leverage the Best Remote Work Tools: Make use of project management for startups and collaboration tools to stay organized. Apps like Trello, Asana, or Monday.com are great for assigning tasks and tracking progress with your virtual assistant. Communication tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams keep you connected throughout the day. Use a shared cloud storage (Google Drive, Dropbox) for easy file sharing. Calendly or Google Calendar sharing can simplify scheduling. By providing the best remote work tools to your VA, you create a transparent workflow where you can monitor tasks without micromanaging. MySigrid, for example, uses a proprietary task management and collaboration platform (called MySigrid) to coordinate between clients and assistants, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. Find the tool stack that works for you and your assistant and integrate it into your routine.
  
  
• Start Small, Then Build Trust: When you first hire a virtual assistant, it’s wise to start with a few simpler tasks as a trial. See how they do, give feedback, and gradually ramp up the complexity or volume of what you delegate. As your VA proves themselves, you’ll feel more comfortable handing off bigger responsibilities. This iterative approach also helps the VA learn your preferences over time. Before you know it, they’ll be anticipating your needs and handling tasks proactively. (It’s not uncommon for a great assistant to eventually know your schedule or business better than you do!)
  
  
• Treat Your VA as a Team Member: Even if your assistant is halfway around the world, remember that they are human – not just an “outsourced worker.” Include them in team meetings or brainstorming when relevant, give them context about how their work contributes to the big picture, and show appreciation for tasks done well. The more your remote staffing feels like an integrated remote team, the more ownership your VA will take. This also creates a culture of trust. If you’ve chosen a managed VA service like MySigrid, you’ll likely have a Customer Success Manager as well to facilitate communication, handle any issues, and ensure the relationship runs smoothly. Don’t hesitate to lean on that support.
  
  
• Embrace AI and Automation (with Caution): We’d be remiss not to mention the rise of AI-powered virtual assistants and automation tools. From AI scheduling assistants to GPT-4 writing aids, these tools can complement your human VA’s work. Many virtual assistants now use AI to draft emails or reports faster, or automation to handle repetitive processes. For example, your VA might set up an automation in remote staffing workflows – like using Zapier to auto-log form submissions into a spreadsheet, saving manual data entry. MySigrid’s approach actually combines human assistants with advanced AI and a centralized platform, so clients get the best of both – efficient automation plus the judgment of a human. That said, AI can’t replace the personal touch. Use it to augment, not substitute. The ideal is a human+AI hybrid assistant: let the AI handle grunt work (like screening hundreds of emails or generating a draft outline), then have your human VA review and finalize with the context and personalization that only humans can provide.

By following these best practices, you’ll set a strong foundation for a successful partnership with your VA. Delegation is a skill – once you master it, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it!

The ROI: Benefits of Outsourcing Tasks to a VA

Let’s talk bottom line. Is hiring a virtual assistant really worth it? For most founders, the answer is a resounding yes – and not just in time saved, but dollars earned (or saved). Here are some key benefits of virtual assistants and the ROI you can expect:

• Time is Money – and You’ll Save Lots of It: We’ve already seen how much time a VA can free up. Whether it’s 10 hours a week or 30, every hour you reclaim is an hour you can spend on high-value activities like product strategy, sales, or investor relations. If you value your own time even at, say, $100/hour, freeing 10 hours is $1,000 of value back to you each week. Over a year that’s $52,000 in opportunity value. Now consider that many virtual assistant plans might cost a fraction of that. The math clearly favors delegation. One study by Bain & Company famously found that CEOs should aim to delegate or eliminate tasks worth less than their hourly value; in practice, skilled delegation can double a CEO’s productive output. The opportunity cost of you doing low-level tasks is simply too high to ignore.
  
  
• Direct Cost Savings Compared to Full-Time Staff: We touched on this earlier – the cost of hiring a full-time assistant (or any full-time support staff) can be substantial. Not only salary, but benefits, office space, equipment, and the risk of turnover. By outsourcing vs. in-house hiring, you convert those fixed costs into flexible ones. For example, instead of a $75k salary + 30% benefits for an executive assistant, you might pay a VA service $1–2k per month for part-time support – paying perhaps $20–30k per year instead of $100k. That’s money you can reinvest in marketing, product development, or new hires that directly generate revenue. As one report noted, “the true cost of not outsourcing… is more than $60,000 per year” when you account for lost productivity and higher overhead. In short, a VA can be 3-4x cheaper than a full-time employee for comparable support work.
  
  
• Scalability and Flexibility: Startups need to be agile. Your support needs today might be basic, but in six months you might need more help – or different skills. Virtual assistant services shine here because they offer scalable plans and often a pool of talent. Need to ramp up from 10 hours a week to 40? It can be done without the hassle of recruiting and onboarding a new employee. Need a designer or a bookkeeper for a project? Many of the best virtual assistant companies (including MySigrid) have specialists on staff they can tap into as needed. Your dedicated VA can coordinate with a larger team in the background. This fractional access to talent is a huge advantage of remote staffing solutions. It lets a small startup behave like a bigger company with a full support department – without the permanent payroll. In essence, you can scale with remote teams on-demand, adding capacity during busy periods and dialing back if needed, all while maintaining continuity.
  
  
• Improved Quality and Consistency: Let’s face it – when founders try to do everything, some things fall through the cracks. Maybe you rush through bookkeeping and make mistakes, or you forget to follow up with a prospect because you were knee-deep in product design. Delegating to a focused assistant can actually increase the quality of those tasks. VAs who specialize in a function (be it customer service, scheduling, or social media) will likely do it more efficiently and accurately than a distracted founder juggling 10 priorities. Moreover, having someone consistently handling a function means it happens reliably. Your customers get prompt replies, your bills are paid on time, your travel is smoothly booked – that reliability is priceless. As the earlier examples showed, founders saw key metrics improve (customer satisfaction, lead conversion rates, etc.) once they handed those processes to an attentive VA. Quality and responsiveness go up, and so do customer perceptions and revenue.
  
  
• Focus on Growth and Strategic Work: Perhaps the biggest benefit is also the hardest to quantify: freedom. By outsourcing the busywork, you free your mind to focus on big-picture strategy and creative problem-solving. This is the core of the founder’s job – vision, innovation, leadership. It’s hard to be visionary when you’re stuck in the weeds of daily tasks. Many entrepreneurs find that after delegating, they suddenly have space to think of new product ideas, devise better marketing strategies, or pursue partnerships they otherwise wouldn’t have time for. Delegation also forces you to trust your team and become a better leader. Instead of being an overworked operator, you become more of a CEO. And that’s how you drive your company to the next stage. The ROI of having a clear-headed, strategic founder at the helm is incalculable – it could mean the difference between stagnation and explosive growth.

To sum up, outsourcing to a virtual assistant offers both tangible returns (time saved, costs cut, output increased) and intangible benefits (focus, flexibility, peace of mind). It’s no wonder so many entrepreneurs and even Fortune 500 CEOs are embracing the VA model. As one survey highlighted, medium and large enterprises are increasingly utilizing virtual assistants to enhance efficiency – if the big players are doing it, startups should definitely take note.

Conclusion & Next Steps: Scale Up by Letting Go

The evidence is overwhelming: founders who effectively delegate and outsource work achieve more and stress less. By handing off the right tasks to a capable virtual assistant, you can transform your day-to-day productivity and literally buy back time. Instead of being stuck in the weeds of scheduling, emails, and operational logistics, you’ll be free to concentrate on what truly drives your business forward – whether that’s closing big deals, refining your product, or simply thinking strategically (or heck, taking a well-deserved break!).

The key is to choose the right virtual assistant partner and approach the relationship thoughtfully. That’s where MySigrid comes in. MySigrid is not only one of the best virtual assistant companies for entrepreneurs and executives, but a true long-term partner invested in your success. With professionally managed, vetted assistants (backed by a full team and AI-powered tools), MySigrid ensures you get reliable, top-notch support tailored to your needs. Our clients – from startup founders to Fortune 500 alumni – have entrusted us with everything from daily admin to critical projects, and they stay for years because of the value we provide.

Ready to reclaim your time and scale your business smarter? Let’s make it happen: Book a consultation now to see how MySigrid can match you with a world-class remote executive assistant. You’re also welcome to connect with our founder, Paul Østergaard, on LinkedIn – he’s a big proponent of delegation and would happily share insights from his journey. Don’t let burnout or busywork hold you back. Visit MySigrid to learn more about our services and take the first step toward a more productive, focused, and stress-free way of working. Your future self (and your growing company) will thank you!