I generally recommend every startup I invest in and/or work with have at least one administrative assistant of some form (in-house or virtual) for each ten employees.
Why? You need leverage on your time.
- Your CTO staying at home for a cable modem appointment? No good.
- Your CEO stuck at the Toyota dealership waiting for service? Terrible use of time.
- Your Head of Marketing waiting for a delivery and missing half a day in the office?
And internal stuff:
- Your engineers doing administrative work when they could be coding.
- Expensive resources answering phones, updating websites, social media, etc.
- Worst of all: once you have a real office, not having an office manager. So the core team is constantly taxed with small but time consuming office issues.
etc. etc.
Technology and tools can help a lot. We don’t need receptionists and phone picker-upers much anymore. But there are limits.
Get (relatively) inexpensive leverage on expensive time.
