You have run it for years. You know every account, every exception, every supplier who has to be telephoned rather than emailed. That knowledge is the reason the place works — and the reason a buyer will mark it down. Before you go to market, a trained VRA assistant writes down how the business actually operates and takes over the administration, so what you are selling is a company rather than a job with worse benefits.
I don’t know how I made it this long without even having a VA.Rayan Saleh · Owner, The Butcher’s Grille
They are paying for next year’s, and the only question that matters is whether it arrives without you in the building. Everything a buyer cannot verify, they assume the worst about and price accordingly.
The discount is the visible cost. These are the ones owners discover afterwards.
The most straightforward version. The buyer prices the risk that the business is really a job, and the offer reflects it.
Part of the price gets tied to how the business performs after you leave — which is a strange bet to accept when the business has always run on you.
You agree to a few months of transition. It becomes a year, because nobody can answer the questions except you.
If you are asked to finance a slice of the sale, you keep the exposure — and the new owner struggling is suddenly your problem again.
VRA trains assistants to work out how a business really operates and write it down. That training was built for exactly this moment.
None of this requires you to decide today that you are definitely selling. It is useful the moment you start thinking about it, and it is useful if you change your mind.
No payroll, no benefits, no equipment, no redundancy conversation when the business changes hands.
Sooner is better, because the value is in having actually operated with you one step back rather than in the documents alone. Assistants run on a three-month commitment, so that is the practical floor — but owners who start a year out get something closer to a proven result than a recent change.
Yes. Every VRA assistant signs a confidentiality agreement and VRA will sign yours on request. Nothing about the engagement requires anyone to know you are considering a sale — from the inside it looks like hiring administrative help, because that is what it is.
The assistant administers the back office; they do not supervise anybody, and they are not a manager. In practice they take work off the people who have been absorbing it, which is usually you and whoever has been covering for you.
Then you own a business that runs without you, which is the thing most owners wanted in the first place. Nothing about this only pays off at a sale.
That is the intention. The placement is designed to carry on with the new owner, so the person who learned how everything works stays with the company rather than leaving on the same day you do.
Not all of it, and not the judgement. What can be captured is the repeatable part — the intake, the scheduling, the billing, the chasing, the exceptions you have explained to someone a hundred times. That is most of the hours and almost none of the irreplaceable bit.
The same work reads differently depending on where you sit. These are written separately for a reason.