Today, nearly three-quarters of business leaders rely on assistants to help manage their workload, which is a clear signal that support isn’t a luxury; it’s a core productivity strategy.
That’s where a virtual assistant (VA) comes in. Hiring a VA should make your life easier. But for many leaders, getting started feels like the hardest part.
Most leaders start with questions. What should you expect? What do you delegate first? How long does onboarding take? How do you make sure the help actually helps?
You know what a productive partnership with an assistant will look like, but it can be hard to know where to start. That’s why, at Prialto, we designed our Pilot to be high-impact and fast-learning. We help remove the guesswork. Whether you choose a fractional or full-time virtual assistant, every engagement begins with a structured Pilot designed to set the relationship up for long-term success.
The first 30 days are especially important. This is where roles get defined, routines take shape, and trust starts to form. Rather than leaving those early weeks to chance, Prialto’s Pilot is built to guide you through them, so support feels natural, not stressful.
Table of contents
- The Unique Relationship Between a Leader and Their VA
- Your First 30 Days
- Your Ongoing Prialto Experience
The Unique Relationship Between a Leader and Their VA
Despite all our technology, executives report that they still spend a huge chunk of their day on admin work. Over half spend 30% or more of their time on busy work. Prialto assistants can close this gap.
Working with a Prialto virtual assistant is unlike traditional assistant relationships. It doesn’t feel transactional like a freelancer. They aren’t located at the desk outside your office like an in-house assistant. But they also don’t feel remote and impersonal like traditional outsourcing. It’s
Instead, it sits in the sweet spot between an in-house hire and a service relationship. You’re not delegating tasks to a faceless resource. Instead, you build a real, long-term working relationship. Your assistant becomes an extension of how you operate day to day.
You also work closely with an Engagement Manager who stays involved behind the scenes, making sure support stays consistent and aligned as your needs change.
You get many of the benefits of an in-house employee, without the operational overhead:
- No payroll, benefits, or HR administration
- No office space or equipment to manage
- No need to handle hiring, training, or coverage
At the same time, you get something traditional outsourcing rarely delivers which is continuity and context.
Prialto’s model is powered by people. That means the relationship deepens over time. As your support team learns your priorities, preferences, and working style, they’re able to anticipate needs and take work off your plate before it piles up.
You ultimately develop a partnership that becomes more effective the longer you work together.
Read more: When is The Right Time to Hire a Virtual Assistant?
Your First 30 Days
The first month with a Prialto virtual assistant is all about setting the foundation. You won’t be expected to hand over your entire workflow overnight. Instead, the experience is designed to build clarity and momentum, step by step.
Before Day 1
By the time you join your onboarding call, a lot has already happened behind the scenes.
Prialto uses what it’s learned about you, your role, and your business during the sales process to match you with the right assistant—one who has the skills and experience that fit how you work.
At this point, your assistant has already completed, or is actively moving through, Prialto’s 4 weeks of standard training. You never have to start from scratch.
This early phase is about preparation, so your first conversation can focus on real work and not admin setup.
Before Day 1, the Prialto team is busy:
- Matching you with the right assistant based on your goals and support needs
- Coordinating tool and email access with you or your IT team
- Beginning a member manual that captures your workflows, preferences, and key details
To see how this plays out in real organizations, here’s what early Prialto support looked like for Ascendant FX.
They started a Pilot with Prialto, onboarding only a couple of their sales leaders to start, and scaled the partnership to 12 assistants supporting the entire sales team and other executives as the company.
Before working with Prialto, their sales team lost hours every week to admin work like:
- CRM updates
- List building
- Reporting
- Scheduling
These kinds of tasks slowly crowded out actual selling, dragging down the sales team’s productivity. Once their Prialto support was up and running, assistants took ownership of those recurring workflows.
“We started with a few PAs. After seeing the value, the relationship expanded to assign one to every salesperson, and they love the service,” Rob said. “Best of all, they don’t require any hand-holding by me or anyone else. We just tell them what we need, and they get it done.” Rob works directly with Prialto’s Engagement Manager. When they identify a new task to offload, the Engagement Manager and Prialto’s managers train PAs on the new process. “So much happens in the background that I don’t need to worry about,” Rob said.
Over time, that support scaled into hundreds of hours saved each month. The key wasn’t just delegation, it was consistency. As the assistants learned about the team’s systems and priorities, work stopped bouncing back for revisions and started getting done the “right” way, without extra explanation.
Your Onboarding Call
Day one officially starts with your onboarding call. This is the most structured meeting you’ll have with the Prialto team, and it plays a big role in how smoothly the relationship unfolds.
The goal of this call isn’t to hand over a long task list. It’s to understand how you work. Your business context, your priorities, and the details that make your day run the way it does all matter here.
Think of it as setting the blueprint for your support.
During the call, you’ll choose one process to start with. For many leaders, that’s something foundational like email or calendar management.
For others, it’s the task that’s taking up the most mental space right now, which could be business travel planning or even marketing admin tasks.
Starting with a single process lets your assistant learn your style and preferences deeply before expanding into additional workflows.
On the onboarding call, your team will:
- Introduce your Engagement Manager, Productivity Assistant(s), and behind-the-scenes support team
- Capture key business and role-specific details
- Walk through the first process and schedule any necessary trainings
- Document important preferences and build them into your member manual
- Align on how you’d like to communicate day to day
This call creates shared understanding from the start, so as more tasks roll out, they’re handled with context, not guesswork.
Day 2-30
Once your onboarding call is done, the real rhythm starts to form.
The next few weeks are about refining what you’ve already put in motion and building confidence on both sides.
Your support team focuses on getting that first process dialed in, learning your systems, anticipating patterns, and tightening the details until it runs smoothly without constant input from you.
As that foundation settles, you’ll also start mapping what comes next. If your workflows are closely connected, or if you began with core support like email, calendar, or document management, it’s common to begin ramping up a second process during this window.
During days 2-30, your Prialto team will:
- Work with you to build a clear process roadmap, prioritizing what to take on next
- Establish a regular sync cadence that fits your schedule
- Capture preferences and workflow optimizations as they come up in real work, not hypotheticals
- Learn your business context so support feels intuitive, not reactive
- Train and support your assistant behind the scenes, with continued oversight from the Prialto team
- Document workflows and create SOPs so support stays consistent over time
By the end of the first month, you’re no longer “trying out” support. You’re building momentum, with systems in place and a team that understands how you work.
This approach becomes even clearer when you look at how a client experienced their first weeks with Prialto.
At SHRM Hawaii, a single leader was managing everything from member communications to event logistics and board coordination. Early support focused on foundational admin and scheduling but quickly expanded as trust and familiarity grew.
The Prialto assistant became deeply embedded in how the organization operated. They handled daily requests, managed complex to-dos, and stepped in wherever help was needed.
What made the difference was the continuity.
Because the assistant truly understood the business context, support felt proactive rather than reactive. This freed up leadership to focus on growth instead of day-to-day coordination.
“Prialto’s process is very smart. They don’t just hire someone and take care of their payroll; they have teams, support, and constant training. There were a lot of virtual assistants out there, but Prialto offered a better approach.”
- Karen Smith, SHRM Hawaii Executive Director
Your Ongoing Prialto Experience
After the first 30 days, the focus shifts from starting strong to building scale.
Days 30 to 90 are where everything starts to really click. Your foundation is in place, your first process is running smoothly, and your team now has the context they need to move faster with less back-and-forth. From here, support expands naturally and at a pace that feels right for you.
Your engagement manager stays closely involved during this phase (and, really, every phase). They make sure quality stays high and look for opportunities to streamline or elevate the work. As new workflows come online, Prialto documents every step, so support remains consistent. Even as your priorities evolve.
During this stage, your team will typically:
- Add new workflows as your comfort and capacity grow
- Build documentation and best practices in parallel so nothing lives only “in someone’s head”
- Refine processes to reduce friction and anticipate your needs
- Look for smarter, faster ways to handle recurring tasks
- Adjust cadence and responsibilities as your role or workload shifts
Your assistant and engagement manager continue to refine how work gets done, looking for ways to streamline, anticipate needs, and reduce friction.
By the end of the Pilot, you’re no longer reacting to tasks as they come in. You’re supported by a system that understands how you work and is designed to grow with you.
Ready to see what your first 30 days could look like?
Explore book a quick call to walk through your unique support needs.