You Don't Need Perfect SOPs Before Hiring a Virtual Assistant
One of the most common reasons business owners delay hiring a virtual assistant sounds incredibly responsible:
“I need to get my processes documented first.”
Fair.
You don't want to hire someone and immediately throw them into chaos. You want SOPs, clear responsibilities and a nice little folder containing everything they could possibly need.
There's just one problem.
The business you're documenting today may not be the business that exists once another person is actually doing the work.
Auxo founder Samantha Hockenberry learned that firsthand while onboarding a new Operations Manager before an international move.
Her existing processes weren't perfect.
Some were flat-out outdated.
And the original five-month onboarding plan had suddenly been cut to roughly 90 days.
Operations Manager Sonia Narvaez wasn't particularly concerned about the missing operational bible.
Her advice to founders?
“Don't worry about having SOPs ready.”
Not because documentation doesn't matter.
Because documentation isn't the thing that teaches someone how to think inside your business.
An SOP can explain the task. It can't explain the whole business.
Sonia joined Auxo during a period when the business was changing quickly.
The previous Operations Manager had been Samantha's mother, who hadn't been working full-time in the business for roughly nine months. Processes had changed. Pricing had changed. The team had changed.
Meanwhile, Auxo was launching an entirely new internal app.
The temptation could have been to stop everything and document the current version of every process before Sonia took ownership.
But Sonia pointed out a flaw in that thinking.
As soon as another person becomes involved, the process itself often changes.
Instead, she said:
“You start off with checklists. You start off communicating and making sure that the process makes sense.”
That's a very different approach to onboarding.
You're not handing someone the sacred book of How We Do Things Here.
You're giving them enough structure to start, then figuring out together what the process should look like now that the work no longer belongs entirely to you.
Context creates better delegation than instructions alone.
There's another reason we don't think founders should spend months writing SOPs before they hire a VA.
An SOP can tell someone how you currently complete a task.
It usually does a much worse job explaining:
why the task matters
what a good outcome looks like
when the usual process shouldn't apply
what the client cares about
what tradeoffs you're willing to make
what deserves escalation
where the assistant has room to make their own decision
Those are the details that turn an assistant from a task-taker into someone who can genuinely reduce the amount of thinking sitting on the founder's plate.
Sonia described the difference simply:
“I feel like I'm a real team member. I want everything to be better.”
That shows up differently than completing assigned tasks.
It's noticing an invoice that doesn't reflect last week's conversation.
It's catching something strange on the founder's calendar.
It's questioning whether the process still makes sense.
It's having an opinion.
And yes, occasionally it's telling the founder that her idea might be questionable.
While Samantha was onboarding Sonia, she was also building Auxo's new internal app.
Midway through their podcast conversation, Sonia remembered that particular detail:
“By the way, we totally forgot to mention that when I was onboarding, you were building a freaking whole app.”
She had questioned the timing then, too:
“Sam, are you sure about building an app before you leave?”
Samantha's answer was essentially: this has to happen.
So they figured it out.
That's difficult to capture in an SOP.
It's much easier when the person understands the destination and has enough context to navigate the imperfect route there.
Overcommunication early creates independence later.
There is a strange tension in delegation.
Founders hire because they want someone to need less from them.
So they often try to establish independence immediately.
The new assistant, meanwhile, doesn't want to be annoying.
Both sides start rationing communication.
That's exactly backward during onboarding.
Sonia's approach was considerably less subtle:
“People are always so nervous about over-communicating. They're like, ‘Oh God, I don't wanna bother you.’ I'm going to bother you every day, almost every few minutes for the first week or two.”
During Sonia's onboarding, communication was intentionally frequent.
There was a structured one-hour meeting every Monday.
There was initially another 30 to 45-minute block available midweek.
Slack handled the questions and conversations in between.
Within about a month, the midweek meeting wasn't necessary anymore.
That is what successful onboarding should eventually do.
The communication load decreases because the new person has accumulated context.
Trying to skip the high-communication period doesn't create independence faster. It often creates someone who is forced to guess.
Give people guardrails, not a script for every possible scenario.
A useful SOP answers: How do we normally do this?
Good onboarding also answers: What am I allowed to decide when “normally” doesn't apply?
Samantha and Sonia described this as creating guardrails.
The founder establishes the outcome, important boundaries and situations that require involvement.
The person doing the work gets room to determine how to get there.
That room matters.
If every decision still requires founder approval, you've transferred tasks without transferring much responsibility.
If the new person has no guidance whatsoever, you've created the opposite problem.
The goal sits between the two.
Trust requires access.
There was one small problem while Samantha was away.
Sonia needed to issue a refund.
She couldn't.
They had missed a permission during onboarding.
That could be presented as an onboarding failure.
We'd argue it's what real onboarding looks like.
You can attempt to predict every system, permission and edge case someone could encounter before giving them responsibility.
Or you can prepare thoughtfully, give appropriate access, create a clear escalation path and improve the system when reality exposes a gap.
Samantha's broader philosophy during the transition was:
“Either you choose to trust them or you choose not to.”
That doesn't mean giving every new hire administrative access to your entire company on day one.
It means recognizing that someone cannot meaningfully take responsibility for work if you've withheld everything required to do it.
You probably need less preparation than you think.
Should you have some things ready before hiring a virtual assistant?
Absolutely.
Know what kind of help you need.
Know what success in the role should look like.
Have a reasonable starting list of responsibilities.
Set up access to the tools they'll need.
Establish where communication happens and how often you'll talk.
But don't confuse preparing to delegate with finishing your business before another person is allowed inside it.
You can document together.
You can improve processes together.
You can discover that the process you've used for three years makes absolutely no sense once someone else has to follow it.
That's part of building a team.
The goal isn't to hand your VA a perfect business.
It's to give the right person enough clarity, context, communication and trust to help you build a better one.