Hiring An Admin vs Outsourcing: True Cost Breakdown (Scotland)
A £28k Scottish admin actually costs around £38k loaded. VA365 Growth (£599/month) handles equivalent admin volumes for around £7,200/year.
When small business owners in Scotland think about hiring an admin, they tend to compare salary to outsourced cost. That's the wrong comparison — and it usually leads to the wrong decision.
A £28,000 admin in Scotland actually costs around £38,000 once you load employer NI (~13.8%), pension contributions, holiday and sick cover, equipment, software licences and a slice of recruitment cost. Add management time and it's higher still.
By contrast, VA365 Growth — 25 hours of professional UK admin support a month — is £599/month, or around £7,200/year. For most growing Scottish SMEs that genuinely replaces the work of a part-time admin without any of the risk.
There are cases where hiring is right: when you have a full-time, in-office, customer-facing need that demands physical presence. For everything else — back-office admin, calls, CRM, sales follow up, HR admin — outsourcing wins on cost, speed and flexibility.
Many of the most successful Scottish SMEs we work with run a hybrid: one in-house admin for the physical-presence work, plus VA365 for the rest.