UPDATE: It appears RushMore VA is out of business. Please consider one of these alternatives.
RushMore VA is a virtual assistant company in Kolkata, India. They’ve been providing affordable overseas assistance since 2010.
Their modern facility allows them to perform a number of services, ranging from all your standard administrative tasks, to more high level B2B sales and telemarketing. Unlike some other VA companies, they appear to not offer some of the more technical jobs like programming and web development.
RushMore is a time-based service (as opposed to a task-based service), which has its pros and cons. On the plus side, you don’t have to worry as much about breaking up your tasks into 15- or 30-minute chunks, and you don’t have to worry about running up against your monthly task limit as long as you still have time left on the clock.
On the downside though, most plans only bill in 15 min. increments, which can result in less-than-optimal usage. To make up for it, RushMore allows up to 30% of your time to be rolled over to the next month if you had a particularly light workload during the period.
With RushMore, you get the best of both worlds in that they assign you a dedicated virtual assistant, but still make their services available 24 hours a day, completing tasks with a backup VA.
The Good
RushMore VA has a variety of service levels at competitive pricing. Rates start at $240 a month for a 1-hour a day VA, and go all the way up to $1040 for a full time virtual employee. What is unclear is whether the 1-hour a day plan would allow for 5 hours one day a week and nothing the rest of the time, or if the work would need to be spread out more evenly.
If you know you’re going to stick around for a while, and can afford the upfront cost, you can save money by pre-paying for a quarterly, half-yearly, or annual engagement.
There is a 5 hour free trial available on all plans.
The Bad
Not being familiar with the company, I submitted an inquiry requesting some more information. It took 16 days before I got a response! And the response wasn’t very useful. I wrote back within a half an hour, and I haven’t heard back since. Not a great start for a business that claims to be open 24/7/365.
There are some other hesitations I might have as well. They list social media marketing as one of their services, yet have no Facebook page of their own, and at the time of this writing, only 1 lifetime tweet to their name. The social links in their footer don’t even work.
Alternatives
If you’re shopping around different virtual assistant companies in India, it might be worthwhile to check out 24/7 Virtual Assistant or My Tasker.
Have you worked with RushMore VA? If so, please share a quick review your experience below and help others with their decision.