It's usually a Tuesday.

You asked for something on Thursday. You followed up Monday. What came back is close, but wrong in a way that will take you longer to fix than it would have taken to do yourself. And the thought shows up fully formed, no warm-up required:

This isn't working.

Take the thought seriously. Then slow down for ten minutes, because the decision on the other side of it is expensive in both directions. Replacing a VA costs you the search, the onboarding, and another three months of ramp. Keeping the wrong one costs you the thing you hired them to protect. Getting it wrong in either direction is the same mistake made from opposite ends.

So before you decide, work out which problem you have.

The uncomfortable version first

Sometimes it is the person.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. There are VAs who oversold their experience, VAs who are stretched across too many clients to give yours real attention, and VAs who are in the wrong role entirely an...

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 peri...

A mistake made once tells you about a task.

A mistake made three times tells you about a loop.

That distinction sounds like a technicality until you notice what it changes. The first is a training moment. The second is a systems failure with a person standing in the middle of it, taking the blame for a machine that was never built. And most executives spend months treating version two as version one — correcting the same error over and over, getting steadily more frustrated, and concluding they've hired someone who doesn't listen.

They usually haven't. They've built a loop that can't carry a correction.

What a working loop requires

Four things have to be true for a correction to stick. Miss any one and the error repeats no matter how clearly you explained it or how willing the person is.

1. The correction reaches them before the task repeats
2. It shows them the right version, not just the wrong one
3. It updates the rule, not just the instance
4. It lands somewhere that isn't memory