Search for why VA relationships fall apart and you'll notice something about the results before you notice anything about the answers.

Nearly every page is published by a company that places VAs.

That's not a scandal. Placement firms know this territory better than anyone, and plenty of what they write is useful. But it does shape where the analysis stops. If your business model is finding people, the diagnosis tends to arrive at a person, and the fix tends to be another person. Better screening. Better matching. A replacement, at no charge, within thirty days.

Run that logic across an industry and you get a strange conclusion: VA relationships fail because the wrong VA was hired, over and over, at scale.

The pattern in the actual work says something different. Six things break these relationships. Five of them happen after the hire, on the executive's side of the desk, and they're the ones nobody has a commercial reason to write about.

1. The hire was treated as the finish line