Article two of seven. What you actually get when you bring in fractional support.
In article one, I looked at whether fractional EA support was right for your business. If you got to the end of that and thought, “OK, but what actually IS it?” then this one is for you.
In this article we’re going to walk through what fractional EA support actually looks like day to day: the week, the team, the money, and what it looks like in real life.
Section one: a real week
The first thing to know is that fractional EA support isn’t part-time EA support. You’re not buying an EA for 2 or 3 days a week. You’re buying a senior person for the hours you genuinely need across a whole week, which is usually a lot fewer than you think.
Most of the senior leaders we support use between twenty-five and thirty-five hours of fractional support a month. That works out at about six to eight hours a week, give or take. Our very busiest clients, with international diaries that seem to change by the hour, use around eighty hours a month, but they’re the exception rather than the rule.
Who we support depends on the size of your business. In bigger firms you’ll already have an in-house EA or EAs at the top doing the high-level strategic work for your CEO or C Suite, so we come in at the layer underneath: partners, consultants, Heads of function, SLT directors. In smaller firms without an in-house EA, we often support the CEO or founder directly. It’s the same model, just a different shape.
So what does six to eight hours a week actually look like?
Here’s a typical week for one of our VAs supporting an SLT director at a professional services firm. We’ll call her the director for ease.
Monday morning. The director and her VA have a half-hour catch-up call to look at what’s coming up that week, what’s urgent, and anything that needs to be moved. They go through the diary together and the VA already knows there’s a clash on Wednesday and has worked out which meeting to move. The call ends with a list of decisions and the VA gets on.
Monday, rest of the day. The VA triages the inbox, moves three meetings, sends out the board pre-read for Thursday, and changes a travel booking because a client meeting has popped up on Friday. It takes about ninety minutes in total, dipping in and out around other client work.
Tuesday. International travel is coming up next week. The VA rebooks flights, sorts the hotel, submits last month’s expenses, and picks up a delicate scheduling conversation with the EA of a major client (because diary conversations are often diplomatic negotiations disguised as calendar invites).
Wednesday. The director is presenting at an industry event in the afternoon. The VA has sent over the slides already, knows who the director is introducing to whom, and has the briefing notes on the three people the director is meeting for coffee beforehand. There’s a quick Teams exchange when the event runs over and the next meeting needs pushing. More meetings are booked. Around two hours today.
Thursday. The board pack has gone out forty-eight hours ahead, which is the standard at this firm. The VA spends an hour with the director on long-term planning for the next six months of her diary, including the week of leave she’s been putting off booking and visits to international offices. Two hours in total.
Friday morning. End of week. The VA reviews the shared task list, flags anything that’s got stuck, and sends a quick summary to the Director.
Another VA on the team is on holiday, so our VA pops into that inbox several times a day today to check nothing urgent is needed and clear anything she can.
That comes to about eight hours, give or take. The director has spent maybe two hours of her own time on the relationship across the week, it would be an hour without the long-term planning which is a quarterly session. That covers the Monday catch-up, the Thursday long term planning and a few quick messages. Everything else has just happened.
Section two: when you have more than one senior leader to support
Most of our bigger clients have multiple senior people who need support, and a one-to-one VA pairing doesn’t really work for that. You need a team.
The best way to explain how that works is with a real example, so here’s World Rugby. They came to us three years ago with a gap to cover an EA who was leaving. They had two other employed EAs at the very top of the organisation and a layer underneath that was largely unsupported. We started by filling a small gap left by the leaving EA.
Three years on, we’re a team of seven supporting a number of their senior leadership team, the governance function and we are backup when needed for their Accounts Payable. Here’s what that team actually looks like:
- A team lead, who is the single point of contact for our client. She manages cover, training and resource changes, and runs the monthly review with the client’s main contact. She also supports a senior leader herself.
- Six others, each with named people or functions they support. One supports our busiest role, a lady who travels internationally most weeks with last-minute changes (it’s not a role for the faint-hearted). Another with a background in complex secretariat roles, runs the governance support, which covers board papers and committee agendas. A third focuses on purchase order support and she has built a set of processes that run alongside their SAP setup, and she has trained two others on the team to use it. The remaining three handle diary and travel for seven more people between them.
- Seamless cover that works. The team have access to each other’s inboxes to cover one another when they take time off. We also keep a standby VA on hand who could pick up the busiest role at short notice if needed, because no one else on the team has twenty hours a week to absorb that particular role.
- A shared way of working. We have a Slack channel for the team, we train each other on whatever each of us is expert in, and we run annual feedback from the people we support and monthly reviews with the client.
The shape of the team varies a lot by client. At The Chartered Institute of Marketing we run a team of four supporting the senior leadership team. At Clarasys we’ve had a team of around seven running for seven years. We paused during Covid and were called back sooner than expected because they were missing us. It’s the same basic structure for each client, just at a different scale and with a different emphasis.
Working alongside your existing in-house EA
Most of our bigger client teams work alongside an existing in-house senior EA, or EAs and how that relationship is set up matters more than you’d think.
At Clarasys, we were brought on by the EA to the leadership team. She manages our contract. She’s our main client contact. She decides who we support, how budgets are allocated, and when we need to flex up or down. The VA team reports into her.
This means she stays the central figure in the support model. The VA team adds capacity around her rather than replacing her role. She doesn’t lose anything when we come in. She gains a team. World Rugby works the same way: the two employed EAs at the top are still there doing the senior work they were hired for, and our team handles the layer below them.
There’s a side effect that’s worth flagging. Running a VA team is a piece of management work in its own right, and it gives an in-house EA visibility, internal relationships and a body of experience that she wouldn’t have had supporting just one executive. The EA at Clarasys who runs our contract has spoken about it at industry events. The role moves from doing the work to running a team that does the work, and we see the same pattern at most of our bigger clients.
Senior employed EAs are brought in to provide strategic support to the most key people in a business. But often they find their roles diluted and are kept from the vital bit that they were brought in for because of the sheer volume of tasks that land on their desk. An EA can utilise a team of VAs to help them with ad hoc or project work as well as supporting others in the business – giving them the time to properly support their Executive with strategic work.
Section three: where this is different from “a VA”
If you Google “Virtual Assistant”, you’ll find everything from freelance admin support to social media managers and website assistants. It’s all bundled into one giant bucket called “virtual assistant”, and frankly, the bucket isn’t very useful.
This is why we find increasingly Fractional EA support describes our role better.
The people
Our team have an average of fifteen to twenty years of EA experience. They’ve supported C-suite executives, boards, public figures and partners at McKinsey, Accenture, KPMG, Bank of America, Warner Brothers and Marks and Spencer. All of them have been senior EAs themselves. They’ve chosen fractional after a solid corporate career because of the variety and flexibility. We say no to a lot of applicants who aren’t senior enough.
What you get from an agency that you don’t from a solo VA
A bigger business can’t really work with a solo virtual assistant for long. There’s no cover when she’s off sick or on holiday, no plan if the role gets too big for her and it’s a tricky conversation if something goes wrong. With an agency you know you are working with a properly set up business: Cyber Essentials certification, full insurance, cover for time off, vetted associates, defined ways of working, monthly client check-ins to iron out any kinks and team cover. And we can flex and grow with your business.
The model
Fractional senior EA support comes from a team that works inside your business, billed against a budget you can see live, with the same person (or a small defined group) doing the work week after week. You get to build those valuable one-to-one working relationship with your VA or VAs but there is a layer of safety around them.
Section four: the money
You’ll want to know what this costs.
Our standard rate is £50 per hour plus VAT. Pre-paid blocks of twenty hours or more get a discount depending on the number of hours used.
There are three things worth knowing about how the billing works:
- Time is tracked in five-minute increments, if your VA spends five minutes on something, that’s what you’re billed for. Over a month, that adds up.
- You get live access to the timesheet, so you can see at any point where your hours have gone, by whom and on what. Most clients never look. The fact that they can is the point.
- We can run individual budgets per senior leader or department or even country so you can track usage and spend, which is useful when you’ve got multiple cost centres and need to allocate against different budgets internally.
There’s no setup fee, no minimum contract length, and the notice period is thirty days. We don’t believe in tying clients in. If it isn’t working, we’d rather you tell us so we can fix it than have you bound to a long commitment.
Section five: what the first month actually looks like
From contract signing to fully working with you usually takes two – three weeks for most clients. A 1:1 support model is usually quicker to set up than a team. Sometimes it takes longer than three weeks, and that’s almost always because of IT setup on the client side. The rough shape is:
- Week one: we have a first meeting with your main contact, who is often a Chief of Staff, COO, HR Director or your in-house EA. We agree who we’re supporting, the hours needed and what access we need to your systems. We hand over a starter pack with the contract, the data processing agreement and IT requirements.
- Week two: IT and legal sign-off, which is where most of the time goes. We work with your CTO and legal team to set up access on your terms, most commonly through Azure or Entra. We’ve done this with organisations including an international provider of Corporate, Private Client and Fund services, so we know what your tech team will want to see.
- Week two – three: introductory meetings between each senior leader and their named VA, usually an hour each. We capture preferences, working styles, key contacts and what they need most support with, and the VAs build a working document on each person they support so the wider team can refer to it for cover.
- Week two – three onwards: the work starts. We go gently for the first fortnight, with more check-ins than is sustainable longer-term, because the relationship needs time to build and the senior leader needs to learn how to use a VA effectively. It’s a skill, particularly for someone who’s never had one.
Our longest project to kick off took four months from the “yes” to actually billing work, because of the legal, procurement and IT process they had to run us through. We respect the rigour, but it can feel painfully slow when you’re in the middle of it, and that’s the high end. A smaller, faster-moving business is typically up and running within a fortnight, and occasionally within a week
So what does fractional EA support actually look like? Like a proper EA, just delivered differently.
That’s the short answer. It’s senior, experienced EA work, delivered for the number of hours your business genuinely needs, with all the proper agency processes behind it. We bill transparently, and the work is delivered by a team who have each other’s backs.
If that sounds like what you’re after, the next step is a thirty-minute chat. We’ll ask about your existing setup, the senior people you’re trying to support and the gap you’re trying to close. I’m always happy to chat to people about Fractional EA Support – it may be that you aren’t ready yet, or it’s not the right solution, but it’s pretty rare that a conversation about it isn’t a helpful step.
Book a discovery call here: https://book.vimcal.com/p/kathysoulsby/meet-personally-virtual
Next month: how to get your senior leaders ready for fractional support. The biggest reason these transitions fail isn’t the VA or the model. It’s the senior leader not knowing how to use a VA properly. We’ll walk through how to set them up so it works from day one.