Administrative Support Services: What You Are Actually Buying

“Administrative support services” is one of those phrases that hides the decision instead of helping you make it. Two providers can use it for completely different work, at prices ten times apart, with wildly different amounts of your own time baked in.

I’m Nir Sabato, co-founder of Catch. Most of my week goes to founders, CEOs and VPs at US companies between 20 and 300 people. When one of them tells me they are shopping for administrative support services, the first useful question is never which provider. It is which parts of the work they actually need covered, and how much of their week they are willing to spend keeping that coverage running.

Two things follow. First, what administrative support actually breaks into, so you know what you are buying. Then the four ways companies buy it, and what each one costs in money and in management.

What Administrative Support Services Actually Cover

Administrative support is really six separate bodies of work. Providers differ in which of them they actually cover, and the word “services” flattens that difference. For every part, the test is the same: does the work come back handled, or come back as a question for you?

The inbox

Triage, prioritization, drafting, replying, and chasing the threads that have gone quiet. This is not clerical work. Contracts get negotiated here, clients ask for discounts here, and a thread nobody answered for nine days is how deals stall. What you want from the inbox is fewer decisions reaching you, and the ones that do arriving with enough context to decide in a minute.

The calendar

Defending the week, resolving conflicts, protecting focus time, arranging meetings with people outside the company. The booking is never the hard part. The hard part is the back and forth with three external parties in two time zones, and then the reshuffle when one of them moves.

Scheduling that completes

Someone sends a scheduling link. Someone asks for your availability next week, mornings only. Someone needs to move Thursday. Each one is small, and each one costs a context switch. Handled means the time is chosen and booked, not that a link was forwarded to you.

Travel

Flights, hotels, ground transport, and the last mile nobody budgets for: a hotel you can walk to from the actual meeting, a confirmed late checkout, a rebooking at 6am when the first leg cancels. Booking a trip is an hour. Managing one is the rest of the week.

Documents

Decks formatted, contracts filed, templates maintained, folders that still make sense six months later. Batchable work with a defined output, and it behaves differently from the other five. It can wait until Thursday and nothing breaks.

Records

Keeping the CRM and project tools honest, so the pipeline, the notes and the project board still reflect what actually happened this month. Unglamorous. Also where things quietly fall apart.

Write down which of those six you actually need before you price anything. Almost every bad administrative support decision I see comes from buying a bundle and discovering it is strong at the part you did not need.

The Four Ways Companies Buy It

Four, and that’s the whole list. Each prices the work differently, and each hands you back a different amount of ongoing management.

An employee

You hire an executive or administrative assistant. You get full context, full commitment, and someone who can be in a room.

What it costs: a fully loaded US executive assistant might cost $120,000 to $180,000 a year in a senior-role budget, depending on location and experience once you count salary, payroll taxes, benefits, software and equipment. The base salary is not the number to compare.

What you manage: recruiting, onboarding, performance, coverage when they are out, and the whole process again if they leave. You also keep paying the briefing cost. Two to four hours a week of explaining, reviewing and correcting is normal, and it does not taper off much.

An agency retainer

You buy a managed relationship. The provider vets the person, trains them and supervises them. Prialto, for example, gives every account a trained primary assistant plus secondary backups, so coverage survives someone being unavailable. BELAY matches you with a single US-based assistant from a vetted bench, through an onboarding sequence that includes a sales call, a discovery call with a client success consultant, placement and a kickoff call. Wing pairs a dedicated assistant with a customer success manager and offers a replacement within 24 hours at no extra cost.

What it costs: this is where the market is widest. BELAY publishes an estimate that a typical US-based virtual assistant costs $1,200 to $3,000 a month, or $30 to $75 an hour, though it does not list its own rates publicly. Wing does publish: $699 a month for 80 hours of general assistant time, $999 for 160 hours, executive assistant plans from $1,299 part-time and $1,999 full-time, and US-based assistants from $2,499 part-time and $4,999 full-time.

What you manage: less than with an employee, which is exactly what the premium buys. You still own the briefing, the corrections, the standard operating procedures, and the relationship. Where the plan is sold in hours, as Wing’s published plans are, the month has a floor and a ceiling, and admin volume is lumpy.

A freelancer

You hire direct. Cheapest per hour of the three human routes, because the management layer is not in the price.

What it costs: below the band an agency charges for comparable work, since nobody is being paid to supervise.

What you manage: all of it. Writing the role, screening, the trial, onboarding, quality, and starting over when the arrangement ends. If your calendar is the reason you are hiring, be honest about whether you have those weeks. The route works well when the work is defined and repeatable. It works badly when it needs judgment about your priorities.

Software

You subscribe. No hiring, no shift, no ramp that depends on one person staying.

The category splits, though, and the split matters more than the price. Most tools in it assist: they surface a conflict, draft a reply, generate a link, and leave the action with you. That is help, not delegation, and the decision load sits exactly where it was. Ask any software route one question. Does work come back done, or come back as a suggestion?

Catch is the second kind. It is a flat $99 per person a month, voice included, with no per-call fees and a 10-day free trial.

What It Costs, and What It Costs You to Run

Route	Money	What you manage
Catch	Flat $99/person/month	Correct it when it gets something wrong; it learns from that
Full-time US employee	$120,000 to $180,000/year all-in	Hiring, onboarding, performance, coverage, turnover
Managed agency retainer	$699 to $4,999/month on Wing’s published plans; BELAY does not publish its own	Briefing, corrections, procedures, the limits of the plan
Freelancer hired direct	Below agency rates for comparable work	Everything: sourcing, trial, onboarding, quality, replacement

That right-hand column is the one most comparisons leave out, and it is usually the bigger number. If your own time is worth $150 an hour, three hours a week of supervision is about $23,000 a year, spent managing the arrangement you bought to get time back.

Which Parts Each Route Covers Well

Match the route to the six parts rather than to a brand.

Document work, filing and recurring data cleanup are batchable, and a retainer or an employee handles them well. BELAY lists CRM updates and lead list cleanup among the work its assistants do, Wing lists data entry, and Prialto’s assistants do CRM data entry and updates in Salesforce and HubSpot. Expenses sit here too, and scope varies enough that it is worth asking each provider directly: Prialto processes expense reports and routine bookkeeping, and Wing covers expense tracking and invoice processing.

The inbox, the calendar, scheduling and travel behave differently. They are time-sensitive, they need context about your priorities, and they do not respect a shift. With a human route, what gets covered is whatever the plan’s hours and coverage window cover, so that is the thing to pin down before you sign: how many hours, and when. It is not a criticism of anyone’s service to ask; it is the first thing to establish.

Anything physical stays with a person. Being in the room, greeting a visitor, handling what is on a desk.

How Catch Covers the Function

Corporate travel booking is in beta for selected Catch customers. It covers supported flights and hotels, with approval required before purchase. Fares, room charges, and supplier change or cancellation fees are separate from the $99 per person monthly subscription. Ask about availability and supported trip types before relying on it. See the travel beta.

Catch handles the traditional executive assistant role end to end. It triages and runs your inbox, sends on your behalf, and chases the threads that have gone quiet. It owns the calendar and resolves conflicts by actually reaching out to the other party, and it books scheduling instead of forwarding you a link. For eligible beta customers, it finds supported flights and hotels and books after approval. It can help with supported changes and call the hotel about room details. It places real outbound calls to make a reservation or arrange a late checkout. It keeps your CRM and project tools current, pulls the brief before a meeting, and flags what genuinely needs you.

You reach it where you already work: Slack, email, text message, iMessage, or by phone. No dashboard to live in, no workflow builder to configure. Setup is connecting Gmail or Outlook, and then you talk to it.

How it decides what to act on

Catch is not a rules engine, and that is worth being precise about, because the difference is the whole product. It builds a picture of you from your connected calendar, inbox and tools, and sharpens it with every correction you give it. Then it weighs what matters: whose email moves a deal, which meeting should shift, which quiet thread is worth a nudge and which is not. When something genuinely needs you, it comes to you with the context to decide.

It verifies before it does things on your behalf. Autonomy is earned rather than switched on, so early on it checks with you more, and as it learns how you work it handles more by itself.

What the management overhead actually is

Correcting it. A note that you never take meetings before 9, that this client gets a same-day reply, that you will not stay in a hotel without a gym. Those corrections stick, which is the practical difference from re-briefing a person every few weeks, and from re-briefing a new person after turnover.

It also does not keep a shift. It works around the clock and can respond outside business hours, which matters most on exactly the parts that are time-sensitive: the 10pm reschedule, the Sunday flight change, the email that cannot wait until Monday.

Security is SOC 2 Type II and CASA Tier 2.

What Catch does not cover

Expenses, receipts and reimbursement are not part of it today. It books the trip; it does not administer the travel program.

It does not do in-person or physical work, and it does not answer your incoming phone calls. It places calls on your behalf and will talk with you directly, but there is no inbound number for outside contacts to call, the same way a human assistant does not pick up your personal phone.

And on the question underneath all of this: nobody needs to be let go. The traditional admin load is handled, and an assistant you already have moves to the operational and in-person work that was always getting squeezed out by inbox triage.

Who This Is For

• Founders, CEOs and VPs at US companies of roughly 20 to 300 people with no assistant on the org chart
• Executives who have an assistant and are watching the admin load outgrow the hours available
• Owner-operators in law, construction, production and similar professional services carrying the same load without any admin function at all
• Chiefs of staff and ops leads who absorbed the admin work and want it back off their desk
• Anyone who priced a $120,000 hire for inbox, calendar and travel and could not make the math work

How It Works

1. Sign up and connect Gmail or Outlook. Under three minutes, no setup wizard.
2. Connect what else matters if you want: Slack, HubSpot, Zoho, Asana, Notion, your note-taker.
3. Start delegating in whatever channel you already use. “Move my Thursday”, “book Chicago Tuesday to Thursday”, “reply to Mark and get the contract back”.
4. Correct it when it gets something wrong. That is the whole training process, and it compounds.

What Changes

The inbox stops setting your agenda. Fewer things reach you, and the ones that do arrive with what you need to decide.

Scheduling stops being a thread. Conflicts get resolved without you being the one to notice them, and external coordination happens without you in the middle.

Eligible beta customers can approve supported flight and hotel bookings and ask for help with supported changes. Availability, supplier terms, and fees apply; ground transport may require separate arrangements.

And the admin function has an owner at a price that does not need a business case: $99 per person a month, against the $120,000 to $180,000 a year a fully loaded US executive assistant costs.

Frequently Asked Questions

Get Started

If you already know which of the six parts you need covered, the fastest way to test the answer is to hand one of them over for ten days. Connect your inbox and calendar, give Catch your real week, and judge it on what comes back handled. The trial is 10 days, then it is a flat $99 per person a month.

Pricing sources

Primary sources for pricing and service descriptions: Wing, BELAY. Confirm current pricing, eligibility, and terms with each provider.