🏗️ Industry
Marketing & Advertising
⌚️ Time Saved
20h/week
📈 Company Size
2-10 employees
📍Position Hired
Virtual Assistant
Introduction to Dakota
Dakota Robertson runs a personal brand consultancy and ghostwriting agency. He has over 1 million followers across social media and helps founders grow their personal brands through content.
The problem?
All that content creates a mountain of operational work — repurposing posts across platforms, managing DMs, running engagement groups, organizing top-performing content — and Dakota was drowning in it.
He’d tried hiring VAs before. From the Philippines. From India. Cheaper, sure. But every single time he ran into the same wall.
The Challenge
Dakota’s business runs on content. He posts on Twitter, and that content needs to be repurposed into Instagram carousels, LinkedIn posts, and LinkedIn carousels. He’s got engagement groups that need to be managed. DMs flooding in from multiple platforms that need to be sorted and prioritized. Top-performing posts that need to be cataloged into a Notion swipe file every month.
None of this is complicated work. But it’s constant, and it eats hours.
Before coming to HireUA, Dakota had tried virtual assistants from Asia, mostly off of VA hiring platforms. His experience — in his words:
“Man, you really have to hand-hold them with stuff and walk them through how to do things, and a lot of the time you have to do it multiple times. It’s so frustrating because that causes mistakes in your business, makes you look bad, and it just costs more time and more money.”
The VAs were cheaper on paper, of course. But hiring is often times one of those situations where…you get what you pay for.
But the time he spent fixing mistakes, re-explaining tasks, and double-checking everything wiped out any savings.
He was spending hours managing the Virtual Assistant…who was supposed to be saving him hours.
He needed someone who could be shown something once and just run with it.
Hiring a Virtual Assistant
Here’s what he needed:
DM management: Sort through social media DMs across platforms, categorize by priority, and forward only what matters — delivered to him by noon each day
Content repurposing: Take Twitter threads and posts, turn them into Instagram carousels, LinkedIn carousels, and standard LinkedIn posts
Engagement group coordination: Send content to a LinkedIn engagement group on posting days
Monthly content audit: Pull the best-performing Twitter posts each month and organize them into a Notion swipe file.
Community management: Eventually take over running his paid cohort community.
Budget was $1,000–$1,500/month for 20 hours a week, with the option to scale to 40 hours if the fit was right. EST timezone preferred.
We started sourcing immediately. Within a week, Dakota had five interviews booked. By the third one, he knew.
“On the third interview I was like — this is it. You can just tell. She’s really dialed in.”
He took a couple more interviews after that just to be sure. But it was already obvious. He hired Kate, a virtual assistant from Ukraine.
The Results
Kate started and the difference was immediate.
The biggest thing wasn’t just the tasks getting done — it was the quality gap compared to what Dakota had experienced before with offshore VAs from other regions.
“I show her stuff once and she’s just on the ball. She can pick things up for herself. You don’t have to hand-hold her. She can make decisions, she has good context on the situation.”
Within the first few weeks, Kate was handling:
- All content repurposing across Instagram and LinkedIn
- DM triage across social platforms, with a daily priority summary delivered by noon
- Engagement group coordination for LinkedIn
- Monthly swipe file curation in Notion
- Early-stage community management for Dakota’s paid cohort
Dakota estimates she’s saving him 20+ hours per week — and he hasn’t even fully utilized her capacity yet.
But here’s the part he emphasized most: it’s not just about the hours saved. It’s the mental bandwidth.
“Knowing that all the stuff is handled — I don’t have to log on and check my messages and stuff. It allows me to get into flow state and focus on priority tasks. So not only is it saving me time and energy and focus, but it’s also resulting in more income because I can focus on the stuff that actually matters.”
By The Numbers
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Time from engagement to first interviews | Under 1 week |
| Interviews booked | 5+ candidates |
| Time saved per week | 20+ hours |
| Part-time cost (20 hrs/week) | ~$1,100/month |
| Comparable US-based VA cost | ~$2,000–$2,800/month |
| Estimated savings vs. US hire | 45–60% |
Why It Worked
Dakota had been burned before by cheap offshore hires. The frustration wasn’t the cost — it was the constant hand-holding, the repeated mistakes, and the time lost managing someone who was supposed to be freeing up his time.
What made Kate different wasn’t just that she was competent. It’s that she could operate independently — make decisions, understand context, and execute without needing to be walked through every step twice.
That’s the difference between hiring for price and hiring for quality.
“I’ve had so much going on in my head at all times, people contacting me in different directions, so many messages. This has been a godsend for me.”
Hire a Virtual Assistant Like Kate
If you’re running a content-heavy business and you’re still trying to do everything yourself — or you’ve been burned by cheap VAs who cost more in wasted time than they saved in salary — this is what we do.
We source, vet, and place virtual assistants from Eastern Europe and Latin America who can actually operate independently. Not warm bodies. Not people you have to babysit. Real professionals.