“I need a VA” is how a lot of brokerage owners describe this, and it covers two completely different things that cost different amounts and fail in different ways. Worth separating them before you hire either.
What people mean by a VA
Usually: a contractor found through a marketplace, paid hourly, working from home, often on several clients at once. Rates look low. The person is typically capable and generalist — good at admin, email, scheduling, data entry — and knows nothing about freight on day one.
That is a real product and it is genuinely fine for some jobs. It is not the same as hiring someone into a brokerage seat.
What a dedicated freight-trained seat is instead
An employee — of the staffing company, not a contractor — working one account full time, on your shift, inside your systems, who already knows what a rate confirmation is, why detention exists, and what “drop and hook” means.
The difference shows up in the first month. A general VA spends it learning the industry from your team. A freight-trained one spends it learning your business.
The differences that actually bite
Who employs them
This sounds administrative and decides everything else. If they are a contractor, nobody is responsible for cover when they are ill, nobody owns their equipment, and there is no retention incentive beyond your next payment. If a company employs them, that company carries payroll, leave, cover and the cost of losing them.
Ask the question directly: “Is this person your employee?” Then ask what happens when they don’t show up.
Dedicated or split
A marketplace VA on twenty hours a week for you is very likely on twenty hours for somebody else. That is not dishonest — it is the model. But it means your 2pm exception competes with another client’s, and it means the accumulated knowledge of your lanes builds slowly if at all.
Hourly versus a seat
Hourly looks cheaper and sometimes is. It also creates a quiet incentive problem: hours are the unit being sold, so there is no upside in getting faster. A flat monthly seat has the opposite shape — the vendor wants the person to be good, because good people stay and stop you leaving.
Run the comparison on effective cost, not the rate. Twenty hours a week at a low rate, of which several are spent asking your team how freight works, is not cheap.
Who can be on the phone
Written admin is a forgiving bar. A call with a driver on a bad line in a noisy yard is not. If the seat touches carriers or customers by phone, that is the standard to test against, and it is the one that most often separates the two options.
When a general VA is genuinely the right call
- The work is generic admin — inbox triage, calendar, data entry, research — and doesn’t need freight knowledge.
- You need a few hours a week, not a seat, and the volume genuinely doesn’t justify a full-time person.
- You are testing whether delegating at all works for you, and want the cheapest possible way to find out.
- Nothing in the job is customer-facing or time-critical.
If that describes your situation, hire a VA. It is a smaller commitment and it will probably work.
When it will let you down
- Anything overnight. Coverage that has to be reliable at 3am is a staffing arrangement, not a freelance one.
- Anything a carrier or shipper hears or reads. The bar is higher and the cost of getting it wrong lands on your relationship, not the vendor’s.
- Anything needing judgement about freight. Knowing that a two-hour dwell at a grocery DC is normal and at a cross-dock is not comes from experience, not instructions.
- Anything you can’t afford to re-teach. Contractor churn means re-onboarding, and the second time is not faster because the knowledge left with them.
The questions that tell them apart
Ask any provider these four and the category becomes obvious regardless of what they call themselves:
- Is this person your employee, or a contractor?
- Will they work only my account, and can I have their name?
- What did they know about freight before you placed them, and where did they learn it?
- What happens on the day they are sick, and on the day they leave?
The short version
A VA is a cheap way to hand off generic admin and a poor way to staff a brokerage seat. A dedicated freight-trained person costs more per month and usually less per unit of work that actually gets done properly.
Pick by what the job demands, not by which sounds cheaper. And if the honest answer is that you need a few hours of admin help, we will tell you to hire a VA rather than sell you a seat.
