The Fancy Hands Alternative: Delegated.com 

How do you know when you’ve found a great VA service? Ultimately, it doesn’t happen until you’ve made the first hire. And when you’re a small business, a C-level executive, or even a freelancer who isn’t used to making this kind of hire, that’s a scary prospect.

After all, there are plenty of options out there for hiring virtual assistants. So many, in fact, that it gets hard to tell one from the other. But the truth is, each virtual assistant service is unique. It will have its own ideas for packages, its own internal standards for hiring VAs, and it may not even hire its VAs as full-time employees.

You can’t skip ahead and figure out which one is right for you. But you can do your due diligence by comparing some Fancy Hands alternatives with the service. In particular, we’d like to highlight Delegated’s own services.

In doing so, we’ll try to capture what’s most important to the people reading this: price, the quality of the virtual assistants they’ll hire, and the key differences between the two services. This requires both a general look at each company’s approach to virtual assistants as well as a dive into the nitty-gritty detail that separates them.

Our goal: by the time you’ve finished reading this, you’ll know exactly what separates Delegated and Fancy Hands.

What You Need to Know About Delegated and Fancy Hands

Where do the differences begin? After all, these are two VA services. They can’t be that dissimilar, can they? You’d be surprised. As a Fancy Hands alternative, Delegated is intent on carving out its own space in the virtual assistant services world. But let’s detail exactly what separates the two from the bird’s-eye view:

• Fancy Hands: What separates Fancy Hands apart from the rest of the solutions you’ll see on the market is that it’s all about price. Fancy Hands is perfectly comfortable with outsourcing its virtual assistant services so they can reduce costs to the end-user as much as possible. The New York-based virtual assistant company, established in the early 2010s, does differentiate itself by prioritizing itself with U.S.-based assistants who speak native English. According to VirtualAssistantsAssistants.com, “Customers primarily use Fancy Hands as a time-saving tool for small one-time tasks,” which suggests that users frequently turn to the service for the outsourcing of specific tasks they don’t want to handle themselves, such as data entry. This may be reflected in its motto, “Assistants for Everyone.”
• Delegated: While Delegated keeps its costs manageable, the focus is one quality: it strives to connect virtual assistants with extensive experience and specific skill sets to businesses who need highly-specific work done. Although it does include VAs with general office administration skills, it’s also interested in working with people who need VAs with experience in specific platforms like Amazon or Pinterest, or even with traditional businesses like real estate. It’s a new entry to the market, but it prides itself on high standards in the screening process and U.S.-based VAs who are awake at the same time as their clients.

Overall, you might imagine that the Fancy Hands and Delegated approaches are similar. But let’s look at an individual service package and see where we can identify where Delegated might differentiate itself as a Fancy Hands alternative:

Delegated and Fancy Hands: A Virtual Assistance Service Side-by-Side Comparison

The most obvious difference between Delegated and Fancy Hands--if you haven’t worked with both already--is that of cost. Fancy Hands distinguishes itself by providing low costs. Although not always the case, low costs for VAs tend to reflect lower skills, or at least a more generic approach to VA skills. 

Delegated’s approach is more user-specific, preferring to match a VA precisely to our clients based on the skills of the VA. But as we dig deeper into the differences, we’ll pay attention to more than price. We’ll pay attention to the features offered by the comparable packages here.

And just what are the comparable packages? This is tough. Pricing at Fancy Hands is based on tasks rather than hours. For example, a package with Delegated--such as the Executive 24--features 24 hours of billable work, with options for more hours depending on the user’s needs.

Fancy Hands, however, divides its packages into three categories:

• “Once a week,” or five “requests” a month
• “A few times a week,” or fifteen requests a month
• “Every day,” or thirty requests a month
  

As you might imagine, this makes a direct, apples-to-apples comparison technically impossible. But we’ll still list the services side-by-side so you can get a better handle on what distinguishes the two. We’ve selected Fancy Hands’ “Few times a week” package as our comparable package, since they both fall in the medium range of what both services offer.

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The most obvious differences here are price and structure. By selling its packages by the task, Fancy Hands offers a very flexible structure in which an individual might not have to make a large investment. This may be suitable for freelancers and entrepreneurs who need to hire temporary help for issues like data entry.

In the case of Delegated, the hourly rate essentially allows someone to add part-time help for more consistent work. Although there are smaller packages (as you’ll see below), this is more suited for someone who needs more taken off of their plate on a consistent basis.

Delegated’s structure is also designed for a more consistent approach: even if your dedicated assistant were to drop off for some reason, a backup assistant would be ready to spring into action. And given an emergency in which you need extra help, a 24/7 support service would keep things running along.

The Minimum Virtual Assistant Packages at Fancy Hands and Delegated

It’s one thing to compare two packages that we’ve picked. But what about the bare minimum? What if you’re just looking to break into hiring a virtual assistant and aren’t quite ready to jump into the deep end of the pool yet? Here are the smaller, more introductory packages available at Fancy Hands and Delegated:

Delegated’s Minimum Package

This package is called the “Personal 12” for obvious reasons: it’s designed for something more akin to a personal arrangement in which you have a virtual assistant tackle your daily to-do list. However, that doesn’t mean it’s limited to those types of tasks.

Here are the major details of the Personal 12: 

• 12 hours per month, or three hours per week
• $420/month
• $35 per hour
• 1 user included
• Additional hours for $40/hour, allowed in 5 hour increments

Fancy Hands’ Minimum Package

As you might recall from above, Fancy Hands doesn’t work in hourly increments, but rather by the number of requests you make per week. They call their minimum package “Once a Week,” and here’s what it looks like:

• 5 requests available per month
• $29.99 monthly payment
• Roughly $6 per request
• Dedicated assistant available upon request

Fancy Hands vs. Delegated: The Quality of the Work

It can be hard to quantify something as broad as the quality of a virtual assistant’s work. Nor does a service’s higher price indicate that it will automatically be better. But it’s important to take into account one thing when you factor in Delegated as a Fancy Hands alternative: these two virtual assistant services are not designed the same way.

The most obvious difference is the “request” structure. Just what is a request, and how does Fancy Hands handle it? For example, what if you “request” for your VA to do something that might require twenty hours of work? Have you just found yourself a way around the system?

Fancy Hands works by creating a broad pool of virtual assistants who can jump in and take on your request at their leisure. Once you make the request, it gets entered into that pool, whereupon VAs can review it and claim it if they desire. 

This has the advantage of making it easy to find on-demand help for small tasks like data entry; you simply make the request and someone in need of work jumps in.

Delegated’s approach is different. We want to connect you to a dedicated assistant who specifically knows how to take on the tasks you deem the most important. Which you decide is best for your business is up to you.

Next Steps: What Should You Do if Looking for a Fancy Hands Alternative?

If you’ve tried Fancy Hands but are interested in trying something new with a different type of VA company, Delegated can be your Fancy Hands alternative. Sign up with Delegated and learn what it’s like to build a relationship with a VA that has the exact experience and skills you need to grow your business.