There is a point in almost every online coaching business where growth stalls, and not because the coach is doing something wrong, but because they are doing everything themselves.
The content, the DMs, the admin, the onboarding, the check-ins, the scheduling. All of it, every day, on top of actually coaching clients. At some point, the hours run out and the business stops moving.
The single hire that changed the trajectory of my own business more than almost anything else was bringing on a virtual assistant. My VA, Sheena, has been with me for over five and a half years and I genuinely consider her one of the best decisions I have ever made.
She is the reason I can focus my time on the things that actually require me: content, sales, and delivery, while the rest of the machine keeps running in the background.
If your business has plateaued recently, or you know there are things you should be doing every day that are consistently getting dropped, this might be the missing piece. Here is everything you need to know about hiring one, from when to do it, to how to find the right person, to exactly what to get them working on first.
When to Hire
The rule of thumb I give to coaches inside Online Trainer Education is simple. Once your coaching business is generating around £3,000 a month, it is time to seriously consider bringing on a virtual assistant.
At that point you have enough revenue to reinvest sensibly without it feeling like a risk, and you almost certainly have tasks piling up that are not getting done consistently.
Things like welcoming new followers within ten minutes, running the DM openers, responding to polls and story interactions, engaging with other accounts. These are the activities that keep conversations flowing and calls getting booked, but they require daily consistency that becomes difficult to maintain when you are also focused on coaching your existing clients. A good VA removes that bottleneck entirely.
If you are not quite at three thousand a month yet but you have some funds to reinvest and you know you are dropping the ball on the daily tasks that drive growth, it is still worth considering. The earlier you build this into your operation, the faster everything else accelerates.
How to Find and Hire the Right Person
The platform I use and recommend is onlinejobs.ph. It is a recruitment website based in the Philippines and it is where I have found video editors, assistants, and some of the most talented people currently working in my business.
Hiring from overseas means you can offer someone a genuinely life-changing opportunity while keeping your costs at a level that makes sense for a growing coaching business.
Pay rates currently sit around four to six pounds per hour, which is significantly more affordable than hiring locally in the UK, and for the right candidate it represents excellent earning potential relative to local cost of living.
Post a job advert that clearly explains what you are looking for. You will likely receive upwards of a hundred to two hundred applications, which sounds like a good problem to have until you are trying to filter through them. The way to separate serious candidates from those firing off generic applications is to build a couple of small tasks into the application process itself.
Ask every applicant to find your Instagram account and send you a direct message there with a brief critique of your profile. Then ask them to email you explaining why they believe they would be right for the role.
These two steps immediately filter out anyone who is not genuinely paying attention. When you receive the DMs and emails, look at written English quality, speed of response, comprehension, and whether the feedback on your profile shows any real thought.
A word of caution here: a lot of applicants now use AI tools to write polished application emails, so pay attention to tone. If something reads too formally or feels like it was generated rather than written, treat that as a flag.
From the full pool of applicants, aim to whittle it down to around five to seven candidates and invite them to a short screening interview of around fifteen to twenty minutes.
Cover the classic ground: their experience, why they think they are a good fit, what they know about your business, their strengths and working hours. Trust your gut during these conversations. You are looking for someone who is proactive, responsive, and genuinely interested in what you are building.
From those final interviews, you will typically have one or two candidates you feel strongly about. Make your offer, let them know the starting rate and hours, and walk them through how the onboarding will work. Starting at around four hours a day is sensible, with the option to move to a full-time role as they prove themselves and start to generate a clear return on investment.
What to Get Them Working On
This is where most people get it wrong. They hire a VA and then dump a random pile of tasks on them with no structure and no logical progression. The way I approach it is to think of their responsibilities in terms of a timeline that moves from simple, high-return tasks at the start through to more complex work as they become fully embedded in the business.
In the first few days, give them one job: welcome DMs. Every time someone new follows you on Instagram, their job is to reach out within ten minutes with your welcome DM script. This is a low-complexity task that requires no creativity or deep knowledge of your business.
It is essentially a test of whether they can follow instructions and respond promptly. And crucially, it can start generating a return almost immediately. Every conversation that gets opened on your behalf is a potential call on your calendar.
Once they have settled into that rhythm, expand their remit to cover all of your DM openers. Story replies, poll responses, ghost follower messages, all of the proactive engagement that gets you into conversations each day.
Set them a daily target of around twenty-five openers to begin with. Now they are doing the work that was previously eating an hour or more of your day, every single day, without you touching it.
The next progression is getting them trained on the full DM conversation flow and booking calls end to end. While they have been handling welcome messages and openers in the early weeks, they should also have been watching how you run conversations and learning the process.
Once they are ready to take that on independently, set them a weekly target for calls booked, starting with two per week. At that point they are effectively paying for themselves.
From there you can start adding more complex tasks that support the business without necessarily generating direct revenue. Content scheduling is an obvious one, whether that is posting your batched content at the right times, repurposing your Instagram reels to other platforms, or managing a content calendar.
Admin tasks come next, things like uploading training recordings to your members portal, creating story graphics to promote upcoming sessions, onboarding new clients into your app, and managing your email inbox so nothing important slips through.
The final tier, once they are fully embedded and you have complete trust in them, is things like running your diary, managing client communications, helping with video editing using tools like CapCut or Submagic, and generally taking anything off your plate that does not specifically require you.
The point of this progression is that you are never loading them with complexity they are not ready for, and you are always prioritising the tasks that have the clearest line between their effort and money in your business.
Why This Changes Everything
One of the most common traps in a growing coaching business is spending your most valuable hours on tasks that do not require your expertise. Replying to DMs, scheduling posts, uploading content, onboarding clients. These things matter, but they do not need to be done by you.
Every hour you spend on them is an hour you are not spending on content that builds your brand, conversations that lead to calls, or coaching that keeps your clients getting results.
Hiring Sheena was one of the biggest catalysts for growth I have experienced in this business. It bought back my time and let me focus on the parts of the work that only I can do. What followed was not just a smoother day; it was a fundamentally different and more scalable business.
Making your first hire feels like a big step. But if you follow the process above, you will find the right person, give them the right work, and very quickly wonder how you managed without them.
Inside Online Trainer Education, we help coaches build not just the skills to land and retain clients, but the systems and structures that allow their businesses to grow without consuming their entire lives. Because the goal was never just to make money online. It was to build something that gives you real freedom over your time, your income, and how you spend your days.
If you want to see how it all fits together, head to the top of the page and click ‘Free Training’ to get started.