Published on July 23, 2026
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Time etc is for solo founders and small-business owners drowning in admin who want to hand it off without the cost and risk of a full-time hire. If you need someone to own your inbox, calendar, and busywork starting this week, book the free consult. Skip it if you need a specialist for one narrow, high-complexity role.
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You know that feeling at 9pm when you've spent the whole day on email, scheduling, and admin — and none of it moved your business forward? That's the exact problem Time etc solves. Since 2007 they've matched entrepreneurs with US-based virtual assistants who take the energy-zapping tasks off your plate, so you can spend your hours on the work that actually grows the company. No hiring headache. No lock-in.
Time etc started in 2007 with a simple, almost stubborn belief: entrepreneurs waste too much of their genius on tasks anyone could do. Not because they're bad at delegating — because hiring help is expensive, slow, and risky. So the founders built a middle path.
Instead of forcing you to post a job, interview strangers, and gamble on a full-time salary, Time etc gives you a skilled assistant who's already been vetted. The mission reads plainly on everything they do: help entrepreneurs achieve more by handing off the stuff that drains them.
Nearly two decades in, the numbers back the promise up. More than 22,000 companies have used the service. Over 2,162,122 hours have been saved and handed back to business owners. That's not a marketing round number — it's a running total of late nights reclaimed and weekends given back. The philosophy hasn't drifted since day one: your time is the asset, and everything else is negotiable.
Here's the thing most virtual assistant companies get wrong. They dump your tasks into a shared pool, and whoever's free picks them up. You never build a rhythm. You re-explain everything every time. Time etc does the opposite — you get one assistant, carefully matched to your needs and working style.
That matching is the whole game. The assistants are US-based, pre-vetted, and experienced, so you're not training a rookie or bridging a time-zone gap at 3am. You get someone who learns how you like your inbox sorted, how you want meetings booked, which clients get priority. Over a few weeks they stop needing instructions and start anticipating.
The financial math is where it really lands. Time etc claims up to 90% savings versus hiring a full-time assistant — and when you factor in salary, benefits, payroll tax, equipment, and the months of hiring risk, that figure holds up. You're paying for productive hours, not for someone to sit idle between tasks.
And you can scale up when things get busy, scale down when they don't, and cancel anytime. Try doing that with a salaried employee. The flexibility is the point: you get the output of a hire without the weight of one.
Time etc's core offering is virtual assistant and remote personal assistant services — but that label undersells what they actually cover. The real range spans the daily grind that clogs a founder's calendar.
On the admin side, there's email management (the big one — someone triaging your inbox so you open it to signal, not noise), scheduling and calendar wrangling, and general administrative tasks that pile up when you're the only one doing them. If you've ever missed a follow-up because it got buried, this is your fix.
Then it stretches into growth work. Content marketing and social media management mean your assistant can draft posts, keep your channels alive, and handle the publishing rhythm you never have time for. There's also support for personal tasks — the booking, the research, the life-admin that bleeds into your work hours. It's one person, flexibly pointed at whatever's eating your week.
Let's talk about the task that changes the most for people: email management. If you're a founder, your inbox is probably where good intentions go to die. You mean to reply, you flag it, and three days later the moment's gone.
A Time etc assistant takes that over properly. They learn which senders matter, draft replies in your voice, flag the handful of things only you can answer, and clear the rest. You go from 200 unread to a short list of decisions. That's it. That's the whole feeling — opening your inbox and it being manageable.
What makes it work better than a generic outsourcing service is the continuity. Because it's the same matched assistant every time, they build a real understanding of your judgment. A pool-based service can't do that — you'd be re-explaining your priorities to a stranger every week.
Compare it to hiring an in-house EA: you'd pay a full salary, wait weeks to onboard, and risk them leaving in six months. With Time etc you get most of that value, start fast, and if it isn't clicking, you're not trapped. For the specific job of reclaiming your inbox, that's a strong trade.
A fair question before you commit: how much hand-holding does this take on day one? The honest answer — less than you'd fear, but not zero. Delegation always needs some upfront investment of your time to explain how you work.
Time etc softens that with a free, no-obligation consultation and free personalized task ideas. So before you pay anything, someone helps you figure out what's actually worth handing off. That's genuinely useful, because a lot of founders freeze here, not knowing where to start.
Backing it all is a satisfaction guarantee that lasts the lifetime of your account — not a 30-day trial window, the whole time you're a client. Pair that with cancel-anytime terms and the risk of trying it is close to nothing. You're not signing away a quarter of your budget on a hope.
This is built for solo founders, consultants, and small-business owners who are the bottleneck in their own company. If you're doing $150-an-hour work between bouts of $15-an-hour admin, Time etc is aimed squarely at you. It's also great for anyone who's tried and failed to hire an EA because the cost or commitment scared them off.
Who should skip it? If you need a deep specialist — a senior developer, a CPA, a niche technical role — this isn't that. And if you'd delegate 40+ hours a week every week, a dedicated full-time hire may eventually cost less. Time etc shines for flexible, part-time delegation, not full-scale department building.
Time etc sits in the budget tier, and it earns that positioning. The model is built around productive hours rather than a fixed salary, which is why the up-to-90% savings claim versus a full-time hire is believable — you're not paying for downtime, benefits, or a desk.
The value question really comes down to your hourly worth. If an hour of your focused work is worth several times what you'd pay for an assistant's hour, the math tips in your favor almost immediately. Every task you hand off is time redirected to higher-value work.
Where value softens is at the heavy end. If you delegate huge volumes every single week, hourly pricing can eventually match or exceed a salaried hire. For most founders, though, that ceiling is a good problem to have — and by then you'll know exactly what to hire for.
Time etc does one thing exceptionally well: it gives busy entrepreneurs a real, matched, US-based assistant without the cost, risk, or commitment of hiring. Nearly two decades in business, 22,000+ companies served, and endorsements from Nir Eyal and Richard Branson aren't accidents — the model works.
If you're a founder or small-business owner buried in email, scheduling, and admin, book the free consultation and let them show you what's worth handing off. You'll get your evenings back fast. Just don't come expecting a specialist hire — come to buy back your hours, and it delivers.