Keep the first conversation with a new client, the number on the quote, the handful of relationships that are genuinely with you, anything where your judgement is what the client is actually paying for, and anything your licence or registration sits behind. That list is shorter than most owners expect, and it is not the list you would write on instinct. Everything around those moments, including nearly all the preparation and all the follow-up, can come off your desk without costing you anything that matters.
Nearly everything written about hiring an assistant, including most of what sits on this site, is an argument for handing more over. It is a good argument. It is also incomplete, because some work should not move, and the owners who get this right are usually the ones who decided early what they were keeping.
This is that list. It is shorter than most people expect, and it is not the list you would write on instinct at the end of a long day.
The first conversation with a new client
The call where someone decides whether to trust you is not an administrative step. It is where the work is won, where you find out what the person is actually worried about, and where you form the read that shapes everything you do for them afterwards. Handing it over saves you forty minutes and costs you the one input that cannot be reconstructed from a note in the system.
There is a second reason, less obvious. That conversation is where you learn what your market is asking for this month. Owners who stop taking it are usually the last to notice when the questions change.
Everything around it travels. The booking, the reminder, the background research on their business, the notes typed up afterwards, the proposal built from your template, the follow-up on day four and day eleven. You should arrive prepared and leave without touching a keyboard. The forty minutes in the middle stay yours.
The number on the quote
Pricing looks like a task and behaves like one, right up until you delegate it. Then you discover that what you were doing was not calculating a figure. You were reading a job. Whether this client will be difficult. Whether the scope is real. Whether you want the work at all, and at what price you would rather not have it.
That read is built on every job you have priced and regretted, and it does not transfer in a document. A capable person applying your rate card faithfully will still price a bad job at the standard rate, because the thing you know about that job is not written anywhere.
So keep the number and hand over the rest of quoting, which is most of it — take-offs, supplier pricing, assembling the document, sending it, chasing it, booking the conversation about it. Our guide on handing over quoting and estimating splits that up properly. The same logic covers discounts, payment terms and who you extend credit to.
Where your judgement is the product
In some businesses the client is not buying a document. They are buying your read, and the document is what the read gets written on. A broker's structure, a consultant's diagnosis, a designer's direction, an adviser's strategy: the deliverable is a by-product of a call someone made.
Trouble starts when the document begins to look like the product. It is the visible thing, it takes the most hours, and it is genuinely delegable — so it goes, and after a while the judgement quietly goes with it, because nobody named it as separate.
A test that holds up: if a client received the same output from someone who had your process but not your experience, would they be getting what they paid for? Where the answer is no, that step stays with you, however much of the work around it moves.
The relationship that is really with you
Some clients are yours specifically. They came because of you, they stay because of you, and when something goes wrong they want to hear your voice. That is not sentiment, it is a commercial fact about your business, and ignoring it is how a good account leaves quietly.
The useful work here is being honest about which relationships those actually are. It is usually fewer than you would guess — the ten or fifteen where you know the family situation, not the two hundred where you know the email address. Those ten need you on the phone a few times a year and your name on anything awkward. The rest need reliability, which is precisely what a dedicated person delivers and a busy owner cannot.
Difficult conversations stay with you in every case. A complaint, a price rise, a job that has slipped, a client you are letting go. Routine support travels once the answers exist in writing, which is what our customer support handover guide covers. But the moment someone is unhappy with your business, the reply is yours.
The work you legally cannot pass on
The last category is not a judgement call at all. In a regulated business some acts can only be performed by the person holding the licence or the registration, and no amount of supervision, review or good intent changes that. The lodgement. The recommendation. The assessment. The signature.
The line is narrower than most owners fear. The regulated act is usually a small share of the hours, and the preparation leading up to it is not regulated at all. Reconciling the accounts is not the part that needs a registration; lodging the business activity statement is. Research and a fact find are not personal advice; the recommendation is. Our boundary map goes profession by profession and names the regulator each time, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
If you are in a licensed profession and you have never written that line down, do it before you hire rather than after, and ask your licensee or professional body first — this is general information, not legal advice. One rule sits outside the regulated professions and applies to everyone: money leaving your account. Someone else prepares the payment. You release it.
Keep the moment, not the whole task
The mistake underneath all of this is treating "keep" as a decision about a task, when it is nearly always a decision about a moment inside a task. Client onboarding is not something you keep; the twenty minutes where you meet them is. Quoting is not something you keep; the number is. Payroll is not something you keep; the authorisation is.
Split it that way and two things happen. What you keep shrinks to something that fits inside a week instead of swallowing it. And what you hand over becomes describable, which is the real precondition for it going well. The handovers that fail usually fail because a whole messy category was pushed across with the judgement still buried in it — the cause we see most often, and one we go through in why offshore hires fail.
The work you are keeping for the wrong reason
Now the other half of the honesty, because everything above can be used as an excuse. Most owners hold on to far more than that list, and the surplus is rarely judgement. It is habit, or speed, or the fact that nobody has ever written the thing down.
The tell is the sentence "it is quicker if I just do it". That is true of a single instance and almost never true across a year. If the task happens weekly, takes twenty minutes, and you have been saying that sentence for eighteen months, you have already spent more time doing it than you would have spent explaining it once, properly.
The second tell is a task you keep because it is the one part of the week where you feel competent. That is a real feeling and worth naming. It is not a reason to keep the task. It is a reason to work out what you should be doing with those hours instead.
If you want a way to sort what is left, the four-question framework gives you an order and our resource on which tasks actually travel gives you the test. Both of them assume you have already decided what is staying, and that is what this page is for.
Write the keep list before you write the handover list. It should be short enough to read out loud in under a minute, and if it is not, the extra is not judgement — it is work you have not documented yet. When you are ready to look at the rest, here is how the process runs, and you can book a 30-minute call. If the top of your list should stay with you, we will say so.
The person who runs everything around the calls you keep
The work above is a short list. What surrounds it is not, and that surrounding work is what we hire for. StaffingSolutions.io hires a full-time dedicated executive assistant in the Philippines on your behalf, working your hours and inside your systems, from A$14/hour + GST for Australian clients and from US$9/hour for US clients. No placement, recruitment, setup or exit fees. An initial three month contract, then month to month with no exit penalties, and roughly two weeks from brief to first day.
- Sets up the first conversation and cleans up after it — books the call, researches the business, pulls the history, writes the notes up, so you arrive prepared and leave without touching a keyboard
- Builds quotes to the point where the number is the only thing left to decide, then sends them, chases them and books the follow-up
- Runs the cadence you keep meaning to run: quote follow-up, debtor reminders, the client who has not heard from you since March
- Prepares regulated work to review stage and stops there — the reconciliation, the file, the pack, never the lodgement or the signature
- Keeps the coordination moving between the conversations only you can have, so the calls you decided to keep actually get made
- The number on every quote, and every discount off it
- The first conversation with a new client, and any conversation where someone is unhappy
- Anything your licence, registration or signature sits behind — plus releasing money from your account
- The judgement calls: who to back, what to say no to, which relationships are genuinely yours
Frequently asked questions
Should my virtual assistant talk to my clients directly?
Can a virtual assistant prepare quotes if I set the price?
How do I delegate without my clients feeling handed off?
What if the work I want to delegate is the work only I can do?
How do I tell if I am keeping work out of habit?
Does keeping the client relationship mean keeping the admin around it?
- Tax Practitioners Board — who needs to register — That providing business activity statement and tax agent services for a fee requires personal registration, so the lodgement stays with your registered agent even when the preparation is handed over.
- ASIC — Australian financial services licensing — That personal financial advice requires an Australian financial services licence, so research and document preparation travel while the recommendation does not.
Alfie is a natural facilitator with a passion for building meaningful relationships. A true people person, he thrives on creating genuine connections and bringing people and businesses together, and he excels at fostering collaboration and teamwork. At StaffingSolutions.io he is usually the first person you speak to: he maps the role, writes the brief the recruiters work from, and stays on the account long after the placement.
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