When To Fire a Virtual Assistant, and the 4 Times You Shouldn't

delegation executive support working with a va Aug 26, 2026

By the time an executive searches this, the decision is usually eighty percent made. What they're looking for is permission.

This post won't give it to you, and it won't withhold it either. There are situations where letting a VA go is the correct and overdue call, and dragging it out serves nobody. There are also four situations that look identical from the inside and are something else entirely — and firing in those cases costs you money, months, and a person who was about to get good.

Worth ten minutes to tell them apart.

First, price the decision

At Vamped we teach executives to price their own hours before making a delegation call. Rough version: annual income divided by two thousand working hours gives you a directional hourly value. Someone at $400,000 is working with about $200 an hour.

Run the same math on a replacement.

You'll spend hours on the search — reviewing candidates, interviews, reference checks. Then onboarding, which is your time, not theirs. Then a ramp period where output is low and supervision is high, and where you're doing a meaningful share of the work yourself while someone learns your business. Put your own hourly number against that block and the figure gets uncomfortable quickly, and it doesn't include the tasks that pile up in the gap or the second round of the same thing if the next hire doesn't land either.

None of which means don't do it. It means the decision deserves ten honest minutes rather than a Tuesday-afternoon mood, because "start over" is a real cost that feels like zero.

The four times you shouldn't

1. It's been under ninety days and you never defined what good looks like

This is the most common version by a distance.

The work has been inconsistent, corrections keep coming, and the pattern reads as someone who isn't picking it up. Then you check what they were given and find a task list, a handful of logins, and a couple of calls.

Nobody is good at a job whose standard has never been shown to them. If your VA has never seen an example of work you approved without edits, they've been reverse-engineering your expectations from your corrections, which is slow, demoralizing, and a poor test of ability.

Firing here doesn't fix anything. The next person inherits the same setup and generates the same symptoms, and by month four you'll be reading this post again about them.

2. The complaint is speed or proactivity

They're slow. They wait to be told. I have to chase everything.

Both of these are structure symptoms far more often than they're person symptoms.

Slow usually means unclear priority. When a VA can't tell which of eleven things matters most, they work carefully through all eleven rather than fast through the two that count. That reads as slow from the outside and looks like diligence from the inside.

Passive usually means no standing to act. Someone who's been corrected for going too far, or who was hired into a role described as a list of activities, learns to wait for instructions. That's a rational response to how the job was framed, not a personality trait.

Fix priority and standing, and both symptoms tend to resolve inside a few weeks. If they don't, you've learned something real.

3. You're comparing them to the version of the job in your head

You've done these tasks for years. You do them at a speed and quality that came from a decade of context, and you're measuring a person at month two against that.

This shows up in a specific way: you can't say what "good enough" would be, only that this isn't it. If someone asked you to define an acceptable standard for the task, you'd struggle — but you're certain the current output misses.

That's a signal about a missing standard, not about the person. It's also the mechanism behind most VA relationships that fail while the VA is objectively improving, because improvement doesn't register when the bar is invisible and keeps moving.

4. You're firing them for a decision you made

Two versions.

The scope changed. You hired for admin support and now need marketing execution, or you brought someone on for twenty hours and the real job is forty. That's a role problem, and firing a person for not being a different person is a strange way to solve it. Renegotiate, retrain, or add — but be honest that the situation shifted.

Or you never filtered the list. Everything you were dreading went across in the first two weeks, including work that should have been deleted or automated. When someone drowns in a pile that nobody sorted, that's a read on the pile.

The two times you should

Short list, and it's short on purpose.

Trust. Dishonesty about work that wasn't done, a covered-up mistake, mishandled confidential information, or anything involving credentials and access. Structure fixes performance. It doesn't fix trust, and the calculus is the same as it would be for any employee. Move quickly and cleanly.

A real capability gap, diagnosed in the right order. The person has had clear standards, at least one example of approved work, and a fair window to use both — and the work still isn't there. The sequence is what turns this into a diagnosis instead of a guess. Skip any of the three and you don't have a read on capability, you have a read on your own setup wearing a convincing disguise.

There's a version of this that isn't about ability at all: the VA is stretched across too many clients to give yours a real week. That's a capacity problem, it's usually visible in response times and availability rather than work quality, and it's worth naming directly before deciding — sometimes it's fixable with a conversation about hours.

The middle path most executives skip

Between keep going and hope and start over there's a thirty-day reset with a decision date on the calendar.

Narrow the scope to three to five recurring responsibilities and hand over real ownership of them. Write down what finished looks like for each, and supply one example of output you'd approve without edits. Move feedback to within a day of the work. Put a weekly check-in on the calendar that isn't triggered by a problem. Then set a date thirty days out and decide on that date.

The value isn't only that it often works, though it usually does. It's that it produces a decision you can trust. Fire someone after a fair thirty days against a real standard and you'll never wonder whether the problem was you — which matters, because that particular doubt is what keeps executives cycling through VAs for years.

If you do let them go

Do it properly. The VA world is smaller and more connected than most executives assume, and how you handle an exit travels.

Be direct and quick. A drawn-out ending is harder on everyone than a clear one. Say what isn't working, say the decision is made, and don't argue it.
Handle access the same day, and treat it as procedure rather than accusation. Revoke logins, transfer file ownership, remove them from shared tools and password managers.
Ask for a handover. Where things live, what's in flight, what's about to be due. An hour of this saves you a fortnight.
Pay through the notice you agreed to, even where you're not contractually required to. It costs little and it's the right way to end something.
Offer an honest reference if the issue was fit rather than trust. Plenty of VAs who are wrong for your business are right for someone else's, and saying so is both true and decent.

Then, before you post the role: fix whatever the last thirty days taught you about your own setup. The most expensive version of this is replacing a VA into an unchanged environment and getting an identical result with a different name attached.

Before you decide, score the setup

Whether the problem is the person or the environment isn't a judgment call — it's a set of specific, checkable conditions.

The VA Scorecard runs your setup across the five dimensions that determine whether a VA relationship works, and tells you whether you currently have enough structure in place to make a fair read on fit.

Twenty questions, about ten minutes.

Score your setup →