Hire Your Virtual Assistant – H.Y.V.A. for short – is a virtual assistant company founded in 2009 by Owen McGab Enaohwo. Enaohwo is a Washington DC-based entrepreneur who went into the business of helping others save time. If you watch any of his video interviews, you can immediately tell how passionate he is about your success. With a large 200+ person facility in the Philippines, Hire Your Virtual Assistant is ready to tackle the needs of busy professionals and business-owners everywhere.
HYVA offers a variety of virtual assistant plans, ranging from 40 hours a month to 160 hours a month, at rates of $358 to $1120. On an hourly basis, you’ll find these rates are fairly competitive for Filipino VAs. The most popular H.Y.V.A. plan is the part-time, 20-hour a week plan for $672 a month, which works out to about $8.40 an hour.
The availability of these part-time plans is one thing that sets HYVA apart from other Philippines virtual assistant companies. Others are focused solely on full-time employment, which might be overkill for first-time outsourcers.
HYVA specifically targets ecommerce companies in the fashion and clothing vertical who want to offer 24/7 live support to their website visitors. The assistants will expertly handle live chat, email, and phone support for that industry.
HYVA Intro Video
You also have the benefit of no long-term obligation; there are no contracts to sign and you can quit your virtual assistant service at any time. Hire Your Virtual Assistant offers a money-back satisfaction guarantee and strives to cultivate valuable and lasting relationships with their clients. Recently the company added a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can test out their service risk-free.
I had the chance to sit down with Owen to get the inside scoop on the origins of HYVA, how their process works, and the exact kinds of tasks they really excel in — as well as who should NOT hire them. The video portion of the call didn’t actually record, so you’ll just have to pretend our mouths are moving.
Like we discussed, HYVA provides a dedicated project manager and virtual assistant that you can train to meet your specific business needs. That way your tasks and potentially sensitive information aren’t being shuffled around from person to person. You can build a relationship with your VA just as you would an in-house employee. Plus, most virtual assistants are working during US business hours so you can communicate normally without a shift in your schedule.
Hire Your Virtual Assistant uses the popular Basecamp web-based software for a secure online interface that allows clients and VAs to communicate effectively and monitor results.
Have you had any experience working with Hire Your Virtual Assistant? Please share it here and help others with their decision.
I’ve been working with HYVA for nearly five months and cannot imagine my work life without them. I work for a 501(c)(3) nonprofit focusing on increasing sustainable practices in the global textile value chain. As you can imagine, there’s more than enough work and not enough resources, which forces us to be very creative in finding solutions for getting things done.
Like Paul, I discovered the concept of virtual assistants who were suitable for the work environment in “The Four-Hour Work Week”. I then Googled the term and found http://www.virtualassistantassistant.com and selected three firms for my initial trial. I created a single project for all three firms, two of which had free trials of which HYVA’s was the most generous.
I immediately received an email from the very energetic Owen McNab along with an invitation to a Basecamp Account, which I agree is the only sane way to manage these projects. I received nothing from the other two firms beyond an automated reply that they had received my project request. I then followed up with them and did not receive a reply until the finished mess was dumped in my lap.
Instead of spending the trial going in all kinds of directions, HYVA sent morning and evening reports which allowed me to review their work and course correct if necessary without them having wasted more than 2 hours. The morning report also gave me time to reprioritize projects and have them work on something more pressing should the need arise.
Depending on my project load, I have one main assistant and an additional one who will rotate in as needed. Our very capable project manager has been with us since Day 1, and he’s fabulous, ensuring that we get what we need.
On top of their efficiency, they’re so incredibly pleasant no matter what projects they receive. I give them the full gamut – from rather boring spreadsheet development to research on potential partner organizations to web campaign analyses. I’ve also spent time introducing them to our organization and mission, our Design and Editorial Guide, and have provided them with examples of well formatted documents and spreadsheets for their reference.
I would recommend HYVA to absolutely anyone who is looking for a cost effective and really pleasant way to manage a pretty impressive range of projects.
My name is Paul McAllister and I own and operate a vacation property business called “Beautiful Lac Nantel” which consists of a four-season lakefront cottage located on the most beautiful lake in the Laurentians – Lac Nantel. I am also working on my first book which will show people in their 20’s and 30’s why they should not wait until they’re older to buy vacation property because they can enjoy it and profit from it now.
After deciding that I needed to outsource much of work involved with my vacation property business in order to free up my time to focus on my book, I started to comparing the rates for various virtual assistant providers. I tweeted to my followers for advice and Owen (the owner of HYVA) answered within minutes. He took the time to answer all of my questions and encouraged me to shop around before deciding to go with a provider.
I read “The Four Hour Work Week” a few years ago, and remembered that Tasks Everyday was mentioned in the book. There were a lot of good testimonial videos on their website, so I approached them. I asked them to lower their rates to match HYVA’s and to give me a one-week trial. The representative I spoke with referred this to his management and it was refused, so I went with HYVA since it was the least expensive choice and allowed me to “try before I buy”.
During the one-week trial, I spoke with the project manager that was assigned to supervise the two Virtual Assistants (VAs) that were assigned to me. He helped me to create some systems which included phone scripts that the VAs could use when answering customer’s questions over the telephone. The aim was that after one month, I would choose the better of the two VAs to remain with me. It took less than 2 weeks.
One of the VAs seemed to sit idle after finishing tasks and her results were not up to the same standard of the other VA, who asked good questions and was more interactive. After I brought this up, the project manager removed her from the team and I was left with the better of the two, who has remained an important and increasingly valuable member of my team since then.
Assigning two VAs at the beginning was a good idea. If only one were assigned and they were not “up to par” I would have to re-train the second. Having two simultaneously from the beginning meant that when one was let go, the other could keep on working away.
Today, my HYVA Virtual Assistant is a valuable member of my team who goes above and beyond for me on a daily basis. He handles all emails and phone calls for me – even outside our agreed upon working hours, and he even has taken the initiative to upsell customers which was a nice (and rewarding) surprise.
I plan on remaining with HYVA for the foreseeable future, and also plan on handing over more tasks to them in the future. Despite the small “hiccup” that I had with one of the VAs at the beginning, they have proven to be a very valuable service. I would definitely recommend HYVA to anyone considering a VA to help with their day-to-day tasks.
HYVA is the third Virtual Assistance Firm I’ve hired, and I plan to stick with them as long as I can. They have given me a dedicated 2hr/day assistant, who is fabulous. They use Basecamp, which I think is the only sane way to track what your VAs are doing, and they write me both a Start of Day and an End of Day email. Also, above my VA is a Project Manager, who can help you devise systems to outsource daily tasks.
My VAs English is significantly better than the other firms I’ve used. The quality of work is very good, the timeliness is excellent, and the tracking of tasks is unparalleled.
I thoroughly recommend them if you have recurring tasks that you could design outsourcing instructions for.
I hired contracted HYVA to help me in my Real Estate Investment search, and they help me save an enormous amount of time. I needed someone to do gather data on 200 + communities based on my investment criteria and provide me with spreadsheets that allowed me to zero in on the 2 communities that are in my investment strategy sweat spot.
Working with HYVA is a breeze, I simply explain what I need done in a session that they record, and they come back a few days later, and it is done (way faster than I could, especially with my busy schedule). They are always available when I needed to talk to them. There were some minor issues in the data entry in the spreadsheet (some data put in wrong column), which could have benefitted from a second set of eyes before sending the results back to me, but outside of that, the quality of the work was excellent.