A BPO and a direct hire are answers to different questions

This article was contributed by Alon Pearl, Founder and CEO of VA Masters. He founded the firm in 2021 after hiring a virtual assistant remotely to solve his own bandwidth problem, and now writes on hiring at volume, drawing on the 166,350 applications the firm processed between January 2025 and July 2026.

• This is not a contest. The two models are built for different problems, and the mistake most buyers make is choosing on price rather than on which problem they actually have.
• The demand we see is shaped a particular way: 72% of roles are opened part-time and 46% at exactly 80 hours a month.
• 74% of roles cross more than one area of work, which is an awkward fit for any model organised around a defined function.
• 83.2% of clients run exactly one person and stay there. Most of this demand is not a team waiting to be built.

Role figures cover 323 roles opened February to August 2026. Client figures cover 113 client companies with at least one active placement, September 2026.

What the shape of small-business demand says about which model fits.

The question is not which is better

Business process outsourcing built the offshore industry, and it did it by solving a problem that is genuinely hard: taking a defined, high-volume process and running it reliably at scale, with the management layer, the quality assurance and the continuity that requires.

That is real engineering and it does not become less valuable because another model exists alongside it.

What has changed is not that one approach replaced the other. It is that a category of buyer arrived who never had access to either, and that buyer’s problem looks different.

Here is the position I have taken publicly, and I will stand behind the first half of it as much as the second:

“Traditional BPOs were built for repetitive tasks managed through middle management layers that separate the client from the worker. Modern business leaders don’t want an isolated call center. They want dedicated team members who understand their brand, work directly in their company tools, and help them accomplish high-level work.”

The separation between client and worker is not a flaw in the BPO model. It is the feature that makes scale possible.

You cannot run a thousand-seat operation with every client managing every person directly. But when a business owner wants one person inside their own systems, learning how they work, that same separation is the thing standing in the way.

What the demand actually looks like

Three things about the shape of this demand matter more than any argument about models.

They come from our analysis of 323 roles opened between February and August 2026 and of how client engagements develop afterwards.

Role figures: 323 roles, February to August 2026. Client figures: 113 client companies with at least one active placement, September 2026.

It is part-time. Nearly three quarters of roles are opened below full-time, and almost half land on exactly 80 hours a month.

That is a strikingly tight cluster for a number nobody coordinates on, and it tells you these buyers are sizing the hire to the work rather than to a job title.

It is hybrid. Only about a quarter of roles sit inside a single area of work. The common shape is someone who handles admin and also runs the social accounts, or sales support who also manages the CRM.

A job description built around one function describes about a quarter of this market.

It does not scale. The overwhelming majority of clients run one person and stay there. Most of this demand is not the first step of a team build. It is one role, sized to the gap.

Put those three together and you get a requirement that is hard to serve through a structure designed for defined, repeatable, high-volume work.

Not because that structure is worse, but because half-time hybrid roles are not what it was engineered for.

Who this buyer is

It is worth being specific, because the term small business covers a lot of ground.

In our client base, 62.7% of clients employ ten people or fewer and 91.0% employ fewer than fifty, for the period February to August 2026.

For a company that size, this is often the first or second hire of any kind. And my honest view of what they are buying is this:

“The business world is moving away from rigid, full-time costs. Part-time virtual assistant setups give business owners the freedom to buy the exact help they need, test new work routines without big financial risks, and add more team hours as company revenue grows.”

That is the actual product: the ability to buy hours rather than headcount, and to find out whether the arrangement works before committing to more of it.

Our data suggests most of them find out it works and then do not need more of it, which is a perfectly good outcome and not a failed upsell.

A straight answer on which to choose

If you are weighing this up, the useful question is not which model is more modern. It is which column below describes your situation.

A few practical notes on reading that table.

If you cannot define the work, that is information, not a problem. In our analysis of the software these roles name, roughly a quarter of roles named no software at all.

Those are usually roles where the process has not been built yet. That points toward a person who can help build it rather than a process you hand over.

If the work is genuinely defined and genuinely high volume, do not over-engineer it. A managed operation exists precisely so you do not have to run quality assurance, cover absences and manage continuity yourself.

Those are real costs and they do not disappear because you hired someone directly.

Hybrid roles are the hard case. A role that is 60% admin and 40% something else does not slot cleanly into either model.

In our experience it goes to the model where one person holds the whole job, but it is worth being honest that this is the scenario where the choice is least obvious.

What I would not claim

Two things, because the version of this argument that overstates itself is the one that gets written most often.

I am not saying the BPO model is in decline. Nothing in our data speaks to the size, growth or health of that industry, and we hold no figures on anyone’s business but our own.

What I can describe is the shape of the demand that reaches us, which is one pipeline and not a market.

“Finding a ‘perfect local hire’ right nearby is a myth, because physical location does not guarantee good work. For small businesses that cannot afford high local hiring costs, remote hiring isn’t about replacing current workers. It is often the key first step that helps a founder stop wasting time on basic tasks and start focusing on growing their business.”

And I am not describing a zero-sum shift between models. The buyer in our data mostly did not have an alternative provider before.

They had the work sitting on the founder’s desk at eleven at night.

About this data

The figures here describe what passes through a single recruitment pipeline, not the outsourcing market as a whole. Every dataset of this kind reflects the business that produced it.

Our client base skews toward the companies that find us, most of whom arrive on their own through search and through referrals from existing clients, and that shapes what appears here.

The client-side figures carry one limitation worth naming. They are calculated over clients who are currently active, which will overstate expansion relative to the full history of the business, and a large share of our clients signed within the last year.

Read them as indicative of shape rather than precise.

Every figure carries its own window because our fields reach complete coverage at different points. Roles opened by the agency for its own team are excluded throughout.

Full methodology sits alongside our Filipino virtual assistant workforce dataset.