Last Updated: September 24th, 2026
I recently gave my Executive Assistant a project:
Find us a nanny.
This is exactly the kind of thing I’d normally procrastinate on for 10 days. The work is easy. It’s also annoying as hell.
- You have to find people.
- Message them.
- Figure out availability.
- Schedule interviews.
- Reschedule interviews.
- Check references.
- Follow up.
- Keep track of who said what.
There are about 900 tiny steps, and every single one creates another little open loop in your brain.
So my Executive Assistant handled basically all of it.
My part?
I showed up to five 15-minute interviews.
Three were good. We picked those three to do trials with my daughter, and we hired one of them.
My total time investment was 75 minutes.
I posted about it on LinkedIn. It pulled around 50,000 views, and the comments turned into a small war.
( https://lnkd.in/p/dvyXPHS7 )
The most-liked comment came from a C-Suite Executive Assistant:
“That is PA work not EA work. Try not to blur the lines.”
Another commenter told me I have a Personal Assistant, not an Executive Assistant. Another said this is what a Personal Assistant should do.
A few more showed up to say the same thing in different words.
Here’s the thing:
The people in those comments were arguing about job titles. I was talking about a nanny getting hired without the search eating two weeks of my life.
An Executive Assistant is the person who takes entire projects off your brain — business or personal — and finishes them without you managing the steps.
My name is Kyle Mau. I’m the founder of HireUA.
We’ve placed over 1,100 people into companies across 35 countries, hundreds of them Executive Assistants. I’ve also had four of my own.
This article covers what an Executive Assistant actually is, what they do all day, how they differ from the roles people confuse them with, and what one costs.
What Is an Executive Assistant?
The government has an official answer.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics describes the job as high-level administrative support:
Research, reports, correspondence, receiving visitors, arranging calls, scheduling meetings.
All accurate. And it tells you almost nothing about why people pay for one.
Here’s how I define it:
An Executive Assistant is a right hand.
They’re expected to do just about anything the principal needs, from a business or personal sense. Their job is to get done whatever needs to get done in that person’s life.
No matter what.
If you’ve seen Iron Man, think Pepper Potts. Tony Stark doesn’t hand Pepper a checklist every morning.
She runs the parts of his life he’d otherwise drop, and she tells him when he’s about to make a mess of something.
That’s the job. And it’s a big one.
The person in this seat learns how you think, what you avoid, what stresses you out, and what you forget.
Then they build a system around all of it, so the only things that reach you are the things that need you.
The Real Value Is Projects Leaving Your Brain
Go back to the nanny search.
My Executive Assistant didn’t save me 45 minutes of sending messages.
She removed an entire PROJECT from my brain.
Had I done it myself, I probably would have spent a few actual hours on it. But those hours would have been scattered across two weeks.
20 minutes here. A follow-up there. Remember somebody never responded. Check a reference. Forget about it.
Remember again while eating dinner.
That is so much worse than the raw number of hours.
Most people evaluate an assistant with task math. How many hours can I hand off, multiplied by what my hour is worth.
That math misses the part that hurts.
Every open project sits in the back of your head and bills you for attention while you’re supposed to be doing something else.
Closing a deal. Running a meeting. Putting your kid to bed.
The best people I’ve hired don’t just take tasks off my plate.
They make entire categories of problems stop routing through me.
One Executive Assistant in those LinkedIn comments put it better than most of the critics did.
She said the real value of a great EA is removing whole projects and the mental load that comes with them.
When the assistant owns something from start to finish, the executive gets space to focus on what matters, which is worth more than saved time.
She’s right.
Why “That’s Not an EA’s Job” Is the Wrong Argument
I understand where the critics are coming from.
In a big corporation, the lines are real.
An Executive Assistant to a Fortune 500 CEO runs the business side:
Board meetings, the executive team, investor calls, travel.
The CEO’s household often has its own staff: a Personal Assistant, a house manager, sometimes an entire family office.
In that world, “that’s PA work” is an accurate description of the org chart.
Most business owners don’t live in that world.
A founder running a company of 10 or 50 people has one life and one calendar.
The nanny search and the quarterly planning session compete for the same hours.
If my daughter doesn’t have care, I don’t have a workday.
Finding a nanny became a business problem the moment it started eating my attention.
And check this out:
One of the loudest critics in that thread, a Chief of Staff, admitted that where she works, companies mix Executive Assistant, Chief of Staff, and Personal Assistant duties together all the time.
So the lines everyone was defending don’t even hold in the critics’ own markets. They hold on org charts at companies big enough to pay three people to support one executive.
There’s also something a little entitled about it.
The best assistants I’ve worked with don’t sort requests into “mine” and “not mine.”
They ask one question: What does this person need handled so they can do the work only they can do?
Then they handle it.
If you’re hiring, pay attention to this part.
An Executive Assistant who guards the edges of their job description will guard those edges with you too. You’ll find out the first time something urgent lands in the gray zone at 6pm on a Friday.
Executive Assistant vs Virtual Assistant vs Personal Assistant vs Administrative Assistant
These titles get used interchangeably in job postings, which is half the reason people are confused about what they’re hiring.
Here’s the plain version:
| Role | Who They Support | How They Work | What You Still Do |
| Virtual Assistant | One or more people, often part-time | Executes defined tasks with SOPs and guardrails | Assign the work and check the work |
| Administrative Assistant | An office, team, or department | Handles shared admin across many people | Set priorities for the team |
| Personal Assistant | One person’s private life | Errands, household, family logistics | Run the business side yourself |
| Executive Assistant | One principal, business and personal | Works with autonomy, anticipates needs, owns projects end to end | Make the decisions only you can make |
| Chief of Staff | An executive and their leadership team | Drives initiatives, holds leaders accountable | Set the strategy |
Executive Assistant vs Virtual Assistant
A Virtual Assistant is a doer. A tasker.
Some are very talented. But you’re pretty much always going to need SOPs and guardrails with a VA.
You define the task, they execute it, you check it.
With an Executive Assistant, you expect a lot more autonomy and independence. You expect them to see around corners.
A Virtual Assistant books the flight you asked for. An Executive Assistant notices the flight lands 40 minutes before a dinner across town and moves the dinner before you ever see the conflict.
Both can work fully remote.
A Virtual Executive Assistant is an Executive Assistant who happens to work from somewhere else. The job doesn’t change.
Executive Assistant vs Administrative Assistant
An Administrative Assistant usually supports an office, a team, or a department.
Supplies, shared calendars, filing, data entry, the conference room booking system.
The work is reactive. Someone asks, they execute.
An Executive Assistant supports one principal and uses judgment to act before anyone asks.
When a job posting blurs the two, it usually means the company wants Executive Assistant output at an Administrative Assistant salary.
Executive Assistant vs Personal Assistant
In corporate language, a Personal Assistant handles the private side of someone’s life:
Errands, household management, family scheduling.
For a founder or business owner, that split almost never exists in practice.
The best Executive Assistants cover both, without stopping to ask which bucket a request belongs in.
Executive Assistant vs Chief of Staff
A Chief of Staff is a different hire.
They drive company-wide initiatives, manage other leaders, and act as a strategic partner on the business itself.
Some Executive Assistants grow into the role. Some grow into an Operations Manager seat instead.
But if what’s drowning you is running the company rather than running your day, you’re looking at a different job description entirely.
What Does an Executive Assistant Do?
The exact list changes with the principal, and I break down how my own EA ran my day in what an Executive Assistant actually does. Here’s what the job covers for most founders and executives:
1. Calendar and time
Scheduling, rescheduling, and defending your calendar from everyone who wants 30 minutes “to pick your brain.” Blocking focus time and making sure you actually get it.
2. Inbox and communication
Triaging email, drafting replies in your voice, answering what doesn’t need you, and flagging what does.
3. Meetings
Prep before, notes during, follow-ups after. If a meeting produced three action items, the Executive Assistant makes sure there are three owners and three deadlines.
4. Travel
Flights, hotels, ground transport, visas, and the seat preference you mentioned once two years ago.
5. Projects
Vendor searches, event planning, researching options and bringing you a shortlist instead of 40 tabs, supporting a hiring process.
6. Gatekeeping
Deciding who gets your time, and turning down the people who don’t with enough grace that they don’t feel brushed off.
7. Personal logistics
Appointments, gifts, household services, family schedules. And yes, finding a nanny.
8. Confidential information
Everything above means access to your bank statements, your family, your health appointments, and your bad days. Keeping all of it to themselves is part of the job.
Now notice the pattern.
Almost every item on that list is a small project, not a single task. Nobody “does travel” in one step.
Somebody has to own it from the first search to the car waiting at arrivals.
That ownership is the job.
What Separates a Great Executive Assistant From an Average One
I always say this:
You don’t want to hire employees you then have to find work for.
That’s true for every hire, at every size of company. And it’s the clearest test there is for an Executive Assistant.
If you spend Monday morning inventing things for them to do, you hired a task-taker. A great Executive Assistant finds the work before you know it exists.
The good ones share a few traits:
They anticipate. They see the conflict on Thursday’s calendar on Monday. And they book the restaurant before you remember you need one.
They own outcomes. During the nanny search, I didn’t get a daily update on who’d been messaged. I got five interviews on my calendar.
They learn you once. You explain a preference a single time, and it becomes part of how things work from then on.
They know when to escalate. Autonomy doesn’t mean making every call. It means knowing which calls are theirs and which ones need you, and getting that right most of the time.
When Should You Hire an Executive Assistant?
Company size is the wrong question.
Plenty of founders with small teams run on an Executive Assistant, and plenty of executives at big companies drown without one.
The better questions are about your week:
- Do simple projects sit on your list for 10 days because they’re annoying?
- Does your calendar run you?
- Do good opportunities die in your inbox because you saw them at the wrong moment and never came back?
- Do you remember the same open loops at dinner, over and over?
- Are you spending your best hours on work you’d happily pay someone $30 an hour to do?
If two or more of those sound familiar, an Executive Assistant pays for itself in attention long before it pays for itself in hours.
One caveat, and it goes back to the test above:
If you’re early enough that you’d have to invent work to fill a full-time seat, a Virtual Assistant covers the tasks while you build the systems.
When the work outgrows the SOPs, that’s when you hire the Executive Assistant.
How Much Does an Executive Assistant Cost?
In the US, the median Executive Assistant earned $70,310 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That’s the wage. It isn’t what you pay.
Benefits make up 30% of total compensation for private industry workers. Run the median wage through that and a US Executive Assistant costs you roughly $100,000 a year.
That’s before recruiting fees, office space, and equipment.
And that’s the median.
The top 10% of Executive Assistants earn more than $104,000 in wages alone, which is the level most founders picture when they imagine a true right hand.
Hiring from Eastern Europe, Latin America, or the Philippines changes that math completely.
A great Executive Assistant starts at about $1,500 a month.
That’s $18,000 a year.
Against the roughly $100,000 a median US hire costs you once benefits are in, that’s about 82% less.
Back to the Nanny
Five interviews.
Three trials.
One hire.
75 minutes of my time.
The critics can call that PA work if they want. It was a project that would have followed me around for two weeks, and it never touched my brain.
That’s what an Executive Assistant is for.
How We Do It at HireUA
Book a call. We don’t start with a job description. We start with how you work.
- What your Tuesday actually looks like.
- What you keep procrastinating on.
- What you keep re-doing yourself.
- What drove you crazy about the last assistant, if there was a last assistant.
Sometimes that call ends with a different hire than you came for.
Some founders ask for an Executive Assistant when a Virtual Assistant covers what they need today.
Others ask for a VA when what’s drowning them is decisions, not tasks. We’d rather get the diagnosis right on day one.
Then we source from Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Philippines. Every candidate gets scored against a fixed hiring matrix with a hard cutoff before you ever see a name.
You interview the finalists and judge the only thing left to judge:
Whether you’d trust this person with your calendar, your inbox, and your family’s logistics.
Direct Hire placements are guaranteed for a full year. On our monthly model, replacements are unlimited for as long as the contract runs.
You can watch how it’s worked for our clients in our case studies.
If you want an Executive Assistant who takes whole projects off your brain, book a call with HireUA.
FAQs About Executive Assistants
What does an Executive Assistant do?
An Executive Assistant manages the parts of an executive’s work and life that would otherwise pull them away from high-value work.
That typically covers calendar management, inbox triage, meeting prep and follow-up, travel, projects, gatekeeping, and personal logistics.
The best ones don’t wait for instructions. They own projects from start to finish and bring the executive in only when a decision needs them.
What is the difference between an Executive Assistant and an Administrative Assistant?
An Administrative Assistant usually supports a team, office, or department and executes requests as they come in.
An Executive Assistant supports one senior person and works with far more autonomy, anticipating needs and acting without being asked.
The tasks can overlap. The judgment required is what separates them.
What is the difference between an Executive Assistant and a Personal Assistant?
In large corporations, an Executive Assistant handles the business side and a Personal Assistant handles the executive’s private life.
For most founders and business owners, that split doesn’t exist, because their business and personal lives share one calendar.
A strong Executive Assistant covers both.
Is an Executive Assistant the same as a Virtual Assistant?
No. A Virtual Assistant executes defined tasks and typically needs SOPs, guardrails, and regular check-ins.
An Executive Assistant works independently, sees problems coming, and owns outcomes.
An Executive Assistant can work remotely, which is usually called a Virtual Executive Assistant, but the level of autonomy is what defines the role.
Do Executive Assistants handle personal tasks?
Many do, and for founders and business owners it’s usually part of the job.
Finding a nanny, booking medical appointments, buying gifts, and managing household services all compete for the same attention as business work.
Clarify this in the hiring process, because an Executive Assistant who draws a hard line at personal tasks is a poor fit for most owners.
How much does an Executive Assistant cost?
The median US Executive Assistant earns about $70,000 a year in wages.
Add benefits, which make up roughly 30% of total compensation for private industry workers, and the real cost lands around $100,000 a year.
A great Executive Assistant from Eastern Europe, Latin America, or the Philippines starts at about $1,500 a month, or $18,000 a year. That’s about 82% less than the median US hire.
What skills does an Executive Assistant need?
Organization, clear writing, discretion, and comfort with tools like Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and project management software.
The skills that matter most don’t show up on a resume: Judgment, anticipation, and the instinct to finish a project without being chased.
When should I hire an Executive Assistant?
When simple projects sit on your list for days, your calendar runs you, and you’re spending high-value hours on work someone else could own.
Company size matters less than whether there’s enough recurring work for someone to find on their own.
If there isn’t yet, start with a Virtual Assistant.
Tell Us Who You Need.
Tell us what needs to get off your plate. We’ll help define the role, tell you what it should cost, and recruit in the talent market where that role is strongest.