After Halloween, the virtual assistants who ran the phones and the schedule at Think Maids became the company’s operating team. By the time I moved to Japan, they were the office. Customers rang a Washington number and spoke to someone warm, quick and well informed. Nobody asked where that person was sitting, and it would not have helped them to know.
Then other owners started asking how it worked.
The same wall, everywhere
The questions came from cleaning company owners first, then from lawn care, junk removal and other home services. Almost everyone described the same wall. They had grown to the point where the phones, the scheduling, the quotes and the follow-up were eating their days, and they couldn’t see how to hand any of it over. There was always a category of work that apparently only the owner could do.
When we looked closely, most of that work was undocumented, loosely defined, or never really delegated. It wasn’t that nobody else could do it. Nobody else had ever been shown how.
One owner described the problem better than I could. They had read, again and again, that around three hundred thousand dollars a year was the hardest stage to get past, because you couldn’t afford an office manager and couldn’t grow without one. That was exactly the gap.
An office manager who isn’t in the office
So in 2017 I started Inova Local, the first virtual staffing agency dedicated to home services. We took the team that had run Think Maids, trained more people the same way, and placed them with other owners to run their office work.
I used to describe a virtual assistant as an out-of-office office manager: someone who does the office work of a local business, online, for the hours the business actually needs. The phones, the booking, the rescheduling, the reminders, the follow-up, the payments, the difficult conversations. All of it, done well, by someone whose whole job is doing it.
What we learned about delegating
Eight years of placing assistants in other people’s businesses teaches you more about delegation than any book. A few lessons came up so often that they became rules.
Hire for warmth, train with documents. We could teach anyone our software and our scripts. We could not teach them to enjoy people. So we hired for how someone made a customer feel, and wrote everything else down.
Watch how they treat everyone else. Some people are lovely to the owner and short with the customer, or with the cleaners. Listen to how your assistant speaks to the people who can’t fire them. That is the version your customers meet.
Listen to how your assistant speaks to the people who can’t fire them.
Coverage is part of the job. A single hire is a single point of failure, which is Halloween all over again. An agency can cover a sick day in minutes. One owner who ran four affiliate offices with us wrote that if one of their assistants was sick, it took minutes for someone to take over, and that it gave them the peace of mind they needed.
Delegate outcomes, not just tasks. Some clients outgrew the idea of an assistant who only answers the phone. They wanted someone who would take ownership of a wider list of operational work. The best placements grew into exactly that: a role with judgement in it, rather than a queue of chores.
What it gave people
The numbers mattered to our clients, and some of their growth was remarkable. One cleaning company owner told us publicly that they couldn’t have scaled without our team. But the notes I kept were rarely about revenue.
They were about a family emergency that didn’t become a business emergency: an owner who had barely started with us when something at home took them away for days, and who wrote afterwards that they didn’t have to choose between their family and their business. They were about a couple who came back from a trip abroad to find every outstanding payment chased and every note up to date, and who said it was a relief to know they could be gone and unreachable. They were about an owner whose whole business was run for a while by two of our assistants, while the rest of his office was out. They were about an owner who got their own involvement down to thirty minutes a week and said, simply, that a lot of it came down to delegation.
That is what an office manager who isn’t in the office really provides. Not hours so much as absence that doesn’t cost anything.
Letting it go
Over eight years Inova served companies across North America, including national franchises and Inc. 5000 operators. Kelli, who managed our assistants for most of those years, deserves as much of the credit for that as I do. In 2025 Inova Local was acquired by private equity.
Selling it answered the same question the sale of Think Maids had: whether what we had built had value without me attached. It did. I still think the most useful thing to come out of it was a proof as much as a company: that the office of a local business can live almost anywhere, and that the owner doesn’t have to be the one sitting in it.
If you want to build one yourself, I now teach exactly that in Start a VA Agency. If you would rather hire one, begin by writing down the job that broke most recently. That page is your first assistant’s first day.