The cost of not hiring a PA almost never shows up on an invoice, which is exactly why it goes unnoticed for so long. It shows up in the enquiry that reached voicemail, the quote nobody chased, and the work that only you can do sliding into next week again. This guide shows you how to put a number on your own time, what employing someone genuinely costs once you add everything up, and how to decide whether outsourcing makes better sense for your business.
Cost and true cost are two very different numbers
Cost is what leaves your bank account. True cost is what the decision takes from you somewhere else in your week, your goals, and your ability to move projects forward.
Doing your own admin has a cost of zero, and that is precisely why it feels like the sensible choice. Nothing goes out. Nobody needs managing. When you are watching every outgoing, that logic is hard to argue with.
True cost works differently. It is the hour you spent tidying a spreadsheet instead of speaking to a prospect. It is the new enquiry that rang at half past four while you were already on a call, and never rang back. None of that lands on a profit and loss statement, so it never gets weighed against the fee you were trying to avoid.
Almost every owner reaches this point. Doing everything yourself is not a mistake; it is a stage. The only real question is whether you have stayed in it longer than the business can afford.
Put a number on an hour of your own time
Work out a rough hourly value for your time, then multiply it by the hours you are losing. It is not an accounting figure, but it is accurate enough to make the decision with.
Take your annual turnover and divide it by the hours you actually work. A business turning over £250,000, run by an owner working a 45-hour week for 46 weeks of the year, produces roughly £120 of turnover for every hour that owner works.
Now count what is going elsewhere. If 8 hours a week disappear into calls, inbox and diary admin, you are putting roughly £960 a week of owner-priced time into work that does not need an owner doing it. Across a working year, that lands somewhere near £44,000.
Be straight with yourself about what that figure is and is not. It is not money you would bank by outsourcing tomorrow, because time only turns into revenue if you actually spend it on the work that earns. What it does give you is the price tag sitting on every hour you hand to admin, and a fair test of whether admin is the best possible use of an hour valued at that.
Run the sum on your own numbers before you go any further. It usually comes out higher than people expect, and it tends to reframe the fee you were hesitating over.
Emma recommends: do this against a full month rather than a typical week. Owners consistently underestimate their admin time because they count the tasks they remember and miss the ten-minute interruptions, which is usually where most of it actually goes.
The costs that never reach an invoice
Four things tend to cost the most, and none of them appears anywhere in your accounts.
Enquiries that reach voicemail. A caller who gets a recorded message and no call back is never recorded as a loss. You do not know they rang, so you cannot miss the revenue.
Follow-up that never happens. Quotes go out, and nobody chases them, because chasing is the first job dropped when the day fills up. That work was already most of the way won, then it just gets lost for no reason because no time was dedicated to it.
Context switching. Answering the phone mid-task does not cost you the length of the call. It costs the time it takes to get back into what you were doing, several times a day.
The work only you can do. Pricing, partnerships, hiring, the direction of the business. It slips because nothing forces it to happen, and by the time you notice, a year has gone by. Most business owners repeat the same year over and over just because they don’t dedicate time to the most important things.
What it really costs to solve this by employing someone
Employing a PA costs noticeably more than the salary you advertise, so it is worth seeing the whole figure before you compare it against anything else.
Take a £30,000 salary as an illustration. Employer National Insurance is charged at 15% on earnings above the £5,000 secondary threshold, which adds £3,750. The minimum employer pension contribution is 3% of qualifying earnings, adding roughly £713. That puts you at around £34,463 before you have bought a laptop or written a job advert.
There is a fair point on the other side of that. Eligible employers can claim the Employment Allowance, worth up to £10,500 against their employer National Insurance bill, which can reduce or remove that £3,750 for a smaller business taking on its first person. Check your own position against the current GOV.UK guidance for employers rather than assuming it either way.
Then there is everything that never appears on a payslip. Recruitment time, the weeks before a new person is genuinely useful, the 5.6 weeks of statutory holiday you need cover for, sick leave, and the ongoing job of managing, motivating and reviewing another human being. For a lot of owners, that last one is the real objection. They want the work handled without adding someone else to look after, and they want to keep the business nimble.
The other question is simply whether you have five days of work. Employing someone full-time to fill three days is an expensive way to solve a part-time problem.
Emma recommends: write down what you would actually hand over before you choose between employing and outsourcing. If the list fills a proper week, hire. If it fills a couple of days and changes shape every month, what you want is flexible support.
What changes when you outsource instead
Outsourcing takes away the fixed commitments and keeps the work covered. That is the whole difference. A virtual PA from MiPA is a trained, talented executive assistant who becomes a second brain and an extension of you. They learn your goals and carve a path to make them happen, which is a very different proposition to a task-driven virtual assistant who needs directing every time.
You get that on a fixed monthly fee, so you know what you are paying and the cost does not creep. There is no recruitment to run and no training to deliver. When someone is on holiday or off sick, cover is handled at our end rather than yours. Support scales up or down as your workload moves, and it runs on a calendar-month notice period, so you are never locked into something you have to unwind.
If the pressure is on the phones, call answering puts a real person on your line instead of voicemail. If leads are going cold, appointment setting chases them properly. If it is the inbox eating your evenings, Mi PA takes it off you entirely. The team is in Manchester and works with owners across the UK, so your callers speak to someone who sounds like the person they expected. You can see how that works in practice in our client case studies.
How to decide, in four steps
- Track a full week if you can. Log where your hours actually went, not where you assume they went. Our Productivity Planner will help you: Planner
- Price your time using the sum above, then put the annual figure directly next to the fee you were hesitating over.
- Pick the first thing to hand over. Phones usually come first, because the interruptions stop immediately. Your inbox comes next, because it is the window to the business and it shows where else you need support. Diary management follows once the pattern is clear. Our list of 106 tasks you can hand over is a useful prompt if you are stuck.
- Give it a proper start. At Mi PA, that begins with a Welcome Call, and useful work starts a couple of days later once we have the information and logins we need. From there, it runs to a structured 30, 60, and 90-day plan built around whatever is costing you the most time, so you get some early wins in the first month.
Emma recommends: start with one area rather than handing over everything at once. Owners who pick a single thing and let it settle for a month get much further than the ones who try to clear the entire list in week one.
Frequently asked questions
What does the true cost of not hiring a PA actually mean?
It is the value of what you give up by keeping the work yourself. Missed enquiries, quotes nobody chased, and hours of your own time spent on tasks that do not need you to do them. None of it appears in your accounts, which is why it goes unchallenged.
Is it cheaper to employ a PA or use a virtual PA service?
It depends whether you have a full week of work. Employing brings National Insurance, pension, holiday, sick cover, and management on top of the salary. Outsourcing is a fixed monthly fee with none of those attached, and it suits variable or part-time workloads far better than a full-time role does.
How many hours a week do I need to be losing before it is worth it?
There is no fixed threshold. If admin is regularly pushing the work only you can do into your evenings, the sums usually already work. Price your own time and compare the two figures honestly.
What should I hand over first?
Your phone, in most cases. The interruptions stop straight away, and the difference is obvious within days. Your inbox is the natural second step, then your diary once the shape of the support is clear.
Can I try it before committing to anything?
You can start a free trial for your calls, which lets you hear how the team handles your line before you decide anything else. PA and VA support is not part of the trial, as the real benefits start towards the end of the first month as the relationship builds and we start to fully understand how to support you best, so get in touch if that is the part you are weighing up!
Ready to stop paying the true cost?
If you have run the numbers and the total surprised you, that is usually the moment something needs to change. Tell us what is taking up your week, and we will talk you through what the right support looks like and what it would cost you.
If you would rather see it before you discuss it, start a free trial for your calls and get your phone answered by a real person while you make up your mind. Either way, the aim is the same. You get your time back, and you focus on the Fun Stuff.
