MyOutDesk
Tap a star to rate
MyOutDesk is a virtual assistant staffing company founded in 2008 that serves as a bridge between businesses needing dedicated remote support and international talent pools, primarily from the Philippines, Peru, Morocco, and the United States. The company takes a hiring-focused approach, meaning it actively recruits, vets, and employs the assistants themselves, then matches them to client businesses for ongoing dedicated work. Over 18 years of operation, MyOutDesk has grown to serve 8,500 plus clients and has been recognized by TechRadar as the number one virtual assistant company. This longevity and scale position MyOutDesk as one of the most established platforms in the space, with a track record visible in client retention and revenue growth.
The founding story matters here. Daniel Ramsey created MyOutDesk in 2008 to solve his own time-management crisis across multiple business ventures. Rather than building a marketplace, he decided to hire and place assistants directly, ensuring quality control at the source. That hiring-first philosophy remains central to the company 18 years later. Whereas Fancy Hands routes requests to a shared pool of assistants and Prialto employs global staff and offers fractional hours, MyOutDesk focuses on placing one dedicated full-time person with each client, working 40 hours per week as a remote employee of the client's organization (or of MyOutDesk, depending on engagement terms).
The competitive advantage MyOutDesk emphasizes is extreme selectivity in hiring. The company screens approximately 125,000 applicants annually and accepts only the top 0.7 percent. This is not hyperbole; this number is specific and verifiable. The implication is that your assigned assistant has been through a rigorous gauntlet of evaluation including background checks, skills testing, video verification in two stages, government ID validation, and industry-specific experience screening. For a client considering hiring, this speaks to quality assurance. You are not getting a newly available freelancer; you are getting someone who passed a competitive selection process. The company achieves this hiring speed in roughly seven days and full integration within 90 days, meaning you can move from initial consultation to a working assistant relatively quickly despite the rigor of the screening.
MyOutDesk offers three primary service tiers. The Managed Outsourcing tier starts at $1,988 per month and provides a dedicated full-time assistant with background checks, dual-stage verification, comprehensive onboarding, ongoing account management, and a dedicated account manager for your side. The Specialized Outsourcing tier begins at $2,500 per month and adds industry-specific expertise and advanced skills matching, allowing you to specify exactly which sector your assistant should come from and what prior experience matters. This tier also includes priority candidate selection, enhanced onboarding tailored to your industry, and readiness for compliance frameworks like HIPAA and PCI-DSS. A third Enterprise or Custom Recruitment tier handles larger deployments, offering multi-candidate shortlists, role-specific assessments, flexible team scaling, and a dedicated recruitment specialist rather than just an account manager. All tiers include recruiting, vetting, payroll, benefits, HR administration, onboarding support, time tracking, and a guarantee that if the fit is wrong, MyOutDesk will find you a replacement at no extra cost.
The international sourcing is central to MyOutDesk's cost proposition. The company makes no secret of the fact that its assistants are hired internationally, not exclusively in the US. For a business seeking cost reduction, this is the value driver. MyOutDesk publicly states that hiring an assistant through them can reduce operational costs by up to 70 percent compared to hiring a full-time US-based employee. That gap comes from the difference in salary expectations and living costs across the countries where MyOutDesk recruits. A business owner paying $1,988 per month for a full-time assistant is getting a compelling cost advantage versus hiring a $40,000-to-$60,000-per-year domestic employee, plus payroll taxes and benefits. However, this also matters for work authorization and expectation-setting. Your assistant is hired internationally, which means communicating across time zones, understanding cultural differences, and working with someone whose first language may not be English. MyOutDesk makes this work through extensive training and matching, but it is not the same as hiring someone local.
The company emphasizes industry-specific matching as another differentiator. Rather than placing a generic administrative professional, MyOutDesk screens candidates for prior experience in your sector. If you are in real estate, they seek someone with real estate transaction coordination or agent support background. If you are in healthcare, they find someone with medical office or billing experience. If you are in technology, they look for someone familiar with dev-team workflows. This prior knowledge means your new assistant is not starting from zero in understanding your industry's terminology, processes, and pressures. They have handled similar work before and can be productive faster. The company serves real estate, healthcare, finance, insurance, technology, ecommerce, and other verticals, with specific hiring pipelines for each.
Security and compliance are emphasized throughout MyOutDesk's messaging. The company holds SOC 2 certification, indicating that its systems and processes meet industry security standards for access controls, data protection, and audit trails. It offers HIPAA and PCI-DSS compliance readiness, meaning assistants can be matched to roles in regulated industries without the client having to figure out compliance on their own. This is important for healthcare providers, financial institutions, and other sectors where data handling is strictly governed. The fact that MyOutDesk handles hiring, payroll, and employment law also reduces your own compliance burden; you are not independently responsible for employment tax withholding or benefits administration.
The customer base includes startups, established SMBs, and Fortune 500 companies. The diversity of clients speaks to the flexibility of the model. Someone can hire a single assistant to handle inbox and scheduling, or a growing company can use MyOutDesk's Enterprise tier to build out a multi-person team. Common use cases include real estate agents delegating transaction coordination and lead follow-up, medical offices hiring receptionists and schedulers, accounting firms placing bookkeepers and administrative staff, and ecommerce companies hiring customer service and operations support. In each case, the client owns the relationship and manages the day-to-day direction, while MyOutDesk owns the hiring, legal, and HR infrastructure.
The tradeoff is cost and control. MyOutDesk is more expensive than Fancy Hands but comparable to Prialto. You commit to a full-time employee working 40 hours per week, not fractional hours or as-needed task completion. If you only need 10 hours per week of support, you are overpaying relative to platforms that bill by the hour or task. You also accept that your assistant is hired internationally, which brings benefits (lower cost, often strong work ethic, fresh perspectives) and challenges (time zone differences, language considerations, less likelihood they are physically nearby). Finally, the experience depends heavily on the match. Even with rigorous screening, a good candidate for one client may not fit your culture or working style. MyOutDesk's guarantee to replace the assistant helps here, but onboarding a new person still costs time and ramp-up period.
MyOutDesk's 93 percent client retention rate is the strongest endorsement of the model. Clients who go through the hiring and onboarding process, and who find the right match, tend to keep their assistants for years. This suggests that for businesses where the model fits, it works well enough to stick with. The company's longevity, scale, and specific focus on dedicated full-time placement position it as a leader in the staffing side of the VA space, distinct from task-oriented services and fractional-hour models.