How many billable hours in your Virtual Assistant business?

Billable hours: As a solo virtual assistant, how much of your time is billable? In other words, if you work a 40 hour week, how many hours do you charge out to clients, and how many hours do you spend on your own admin and marketing?

e.g. if you work 40 hours and bill 20 hours to clients, that would be 50% billable hours; or if you work 30 hours and bill 5 hours to clients, that’s 16% (record 20%); or if you work 20 and bill 20 that’s 100% billable.

^ Vote here!

Does your admin take up the majority of your week? Perhaps you spend 2 hours a day on social media marketing your business, but maybe only bill 2 hours a week to clients? It’s especially common for new businesses to spend more time on their own admin because they are in the process of building the business, so will spend more time on marketing themselves. It’s also common for VAs in a growth period to spend more time on their business than billing hours – setting up systems, inducting new clients, etc all take up your time and it’s not necessarily billable.

Or maybe you do very little admin or marketing for your business and whatever time you have to work is spent doing billable client work? If you have a steady stream of well established clients, maybe you only spend a couple of hours billing them at month-end and the rest of your time is spent working directly for the clients?

There’s no wrong answers here, I just genuinely want to see how people are running their businesses and what is “normal”.

Guidance notes:

• Obviously, VAs with teams will skew this so it’s for SOLO VAs ONLY!!!
• Round up or down – e.g. if you have 16% then that would round up to 20%, or 13% you would round down to 10%.
• The poll is totally anonymous – no one can tell who voted.