A guide for COOs, Chiefs of Staff and operations leaders who’ve been asked to solve the EA gap and aren’t sure what their options actually are.
Oh joy, that task has landed on your desk.
Your CEO’s EA is (rightly) tied up with board and governance and can’t keep covering everyone who keeps asking her for help. Your partners are sharing one Team Assistant between eight of them and he’s drowning. Your CFO has said no new heads this year and the Practice Leads underneath you are screaming for support. Whatever shape it takes, you’ve been told to fix it.
The obvious answer is to recruit a full-time EA or another team assistant. For some businesses, that’s still the right call. For many of the organisations we work with, it isn’t. No headcount budget. Workload that doesn’t justify a full-timer. Or six execs who all need support and you’d need three EAs to cover them, plus three desks you haven’t got.
So you’re looking at alternatives. And almost everything you’ll find online lumps “virtual assistant” in with overseas freelancers and admin marketplaces. None of it tells you that fractional, senior, properly experienced EA support exists, has been quietly working for bigger businesses for years, and might be the answer you’re after.
This is the first in a series on how fractional support actually works in bigger businesses. We start with the model question: when an employed EA is right, when fractional is right, and when the answer is a bit of both.
Five signs your senior people are losing time to admin
Before the model question, the prior one. Are your senior people actually losing enough time to admin for any of this to be worth it? Five signs we see again and again across the consultancies, financial services firms and global organisations we work with:
- Your most senior people are spending more than 20% of their week on diary, inbox and travel. The most common pattern. A fifth of a senior person’s week on stuff an EA could do is the point where the maths gets dangerous.
- Things are slipping. Meetings missed. Flights booked late and expensive. Emails buried that became bigger problems. The cost of these mistakes (financial, reputational, relational) is now bigger than the cost of stopping them.
- The 7am and 8pm emails. Your senior people are doing their actual jobs outside business hours because the day is eaten by everything else.
- Everyone in the building is waiting for them. Decisions, sign-offs, introductions, diary changes that should have happened days ago. They’ve become the bottleneck in their own business.
- The talented EA you do have is buckling. She’s covering more people than her role can support, and you can see it. She can’t do her high-level strategic work for the CEO because the sheer volume of everyone else’s stuff is insurmountable.
If three or more of those are familiar, you have a real problem. The next question is what shape the solution takes.
Why your default options aren’t working
Most leaders try one of three things. None of them are great.
Recruit full-time. Brilliant when it works. The problem is the market. Top EAs at the level you’d actually want are commanding £80k to £150k. The £45-55k roles you’re advertising aren’t getting you that calibre. The strong candidates get counter-offered by their current employer and stay put. The ones who do accept are often less experienced than you needed, or they’re gone inside twelve months for somewhere with better progression.
Over-recruit. You need 25 hours a week of EA support. You hire someone for 40 because that’s how employment works. The other 15 hours? Either scope creep that costs you more money, or your EA twiddling thumbs and updating LinkedIn. You don’t get a refund for the hours you didn’t need.
No-hire. The CFO has said no new heads until next FY. The headcount conversation is closed. Meanwhile your senior people are still bleeding time to admin and your existing EA is still drowning. You’ve been told to find a fix without hiring any FTEs.
If any of those is your situation, you’re already partway to needing what comes next.
The bigger number nobody’s counting
Every EA conversation gets stuck on EA salary. £45k versus £55k versus £75k. That’s the wrong number.
The right number is the cost of your senior people’s time being lost to admin. A consultant or partner billing at £400 an hour who spends five hours a week on diary management, travel and inbox is £100,000 of potential lost billing per year. A CEO whose effective rate is £500 losing the same five hours is £125,000 a year of lost capacity. Across a leadership team of six or eight, the numbers get serious fast.
This is the maths your CFO will care about. The salary is a £50-75k decision. The cost of your senior people doing admin is a £100-500k problem.
So what is fractional EA support, actually?
A fractional executive assistant is a senior, experienced EA who works with you for a portion of the week, alongside other clients. Not a junior overseas freelancer. Not a social media scheduler. Not a virtual receptionist. Not someone who works three mornings a week.
At Personally Virtual, we work with senior leaders at organisations including World Rugby, The Chartered Institute of Marketing and Q5 Partners. Our team have an average of 15 to 20 years of EA experience. They’ve supported C-suite executives, boards, public figures and partners at firms like McKinsey, Accenture, KPMG and Bank of America. All have been senior EAs themselves. They’ve chosen fractional because it gives them variety, flexibility and the chance to work with multiple senior leaders rather than one.
The work looks like an EA’s work. Diary, inbox, travel, project coordination, board prep, expenses, supplier management. What’s different is the model. You buy hours, not headcount. You scale up and down as needs change. No HR admin to deal with. No cover or costs to sort when they’re off sick. The people doing the work are the same ones who’d command £100k+ as a dedicated employed EA. Just accessed differently.
A note on what a senior business should expect from a professional Fractional Executive Team. Our team are Cyber Essentials certified (renewed July 2025), GDPR compliant, fully insured, and bound by both our own contracts and any client NDAs you require. Each VA accesses your systems through your own controls (Azure, Entra, Microsoft 365, G-Suite), managed by you. Data access is intentionally minimal. We’ve worked through IT and legal sign-off at organisations including some incredibly private global financial services firms, so we know what your CTO will ask before they ask it.
The model that surprises people: working alongside your existing EA
The thing most Chiefs of Staff, COOs and HR Directors don’t realise is possible: fractional support that works alongside your existing in-house EAs, not instead of them.
This is how we work with most of our bigger clients. They have one to four full-time EAs supporting the very top of the organisation, and we provide a team of our VAs supporting the layer underneath. Diary, travel, projects, expenses, supplier onboarding. The full-time EAs aren’t displaced. They’re reinforced. They go back to the role you’re paying them for, which is maximising your senior leaders’ time. The people they support don’t lose continuity. And leaders in the business who were previously unsupported, or just got the crumbs, now have proper EA cover.
This model works particularly well when:
- You have a senior EA who’s worth her weight in gold, and the support model has to protect that.
- The pressure has shifted to the layer below the C-suite, who don’t have dedicated support
- Your workloads change (client projects, deal cycles, proposal seasons, board cycles), and a permanent hire would either be underused or overwhelmed
- You want to test fractional support with one or two execs before scaling
At this stage, three questions matter. How many people actually need EA support? How busy are they, really? And what are your IT and legal teams likely to make of bringing in externals? Get those answered first. We’ll cover making it work in practice – scope, comms, onboarding – in a future article.
When fractional fits, and when full-time is still right
When fractional fits
- Each exec needs 10 to 30 hours a month of EA support, not someone sitting outside their office 40 hours a week
- Your business is growing, restructuring or the work ebbs and flows month to month
- You’re a senior leader (or a team of them) without any budget for full-time dedicated support
- You already have an in-house EA who’s drowning, and you need overflow capacity
- You’re based outside London or another major city and can’t easily recruit at the level you want
- You want senior-level support without the senior-level salary commitment
When full-time is still right
- Your execs need someone in the building, hands-on, every day
- The role involves significant in-person physical tasks (events, hospitality, hosting workshops, managing the tech for board meetings)
- The workload is consistent, predictable and demands more than 30 hours a week
- The exec is uncomfortable working with anyone they can’t see in person
- You have the budget, the workload, the desk space and the management bandwidth
For many growing businesses, fractional just wins. On cost, on flexibility, on the calibre of person you get. For some, full-time is still right. For many more, the answer is a hybrid. The point is to compare them properly, with real numbers, not to assume.
Five questions to ask yourself before you decide
- How many hours of EA support does each exec actually need a month? Be honest. Most leaders overestimate. As a guide, our busiest exec has a huge international role and only uses eighty hours of fractional time a month. Most regular roles come in around thirty. On-the-clock time and fulltime are very different because we measure in five minute increments.
Can the work be done remotely? If 80%+ of it can, you have options. If not, you’re looking at full-time so you can dictate location.
How predictable is the workload? Steady, or all over the shop around deals, proposals and board meetings? Fractional moves with you. Full-time doesn’t.
What’s the real cost if you get this wrong? Recruitment fees, the productivity hit when they leave, the months you’ll spend doing it again.
Have you priced both options properly? Full-time including NI, pension, recruitment fees, equipment, holiday cover. Fractional including realistic monthly hours. Side by side, real numbers.
If you’ve done all five and full-time still wins, recruit. If fractional wins, find an agency that focuses on seasoned operators, not entry-level VAs.
What to do next
If any of this sounds like the situation you’re trying to solve, the next step is a 30-minute conversation. We’ll ask about your existing setup, the gap you’re trying to close, the executives you’re working to support, and we’ll guide you on whether fractional is the right answer for your business or whether you’d be better off recruiting. We’ve sent plenty of people back to recruitment over the years, when that was the right answer.
Book a discovery call here: https://book.vimcal.com/p/kathysoulsby/meet-personally-virtual
Next month: what does senior fractional EA support actually look like in practice? We’ll walk through a typical week, the team-based model we use to support multiple executives, and the difference between an EA and the kind of “VA” you’ve probably read about online.