The life on the other end of the hire

When you bring on a virtual assistant from Latin America, it's easy to think only about what changes on your side of the desk: the hours you get back, the work that finally gets done. But there's another side to that hire, and it's the side I see first.

What a dollar salary is worth on the ground

The number that matters isn't what a remote salary looks like next to a U.S. paycheck. It's what it looks like next to the local one.

Take Brazil. As of January 2026, the country's minimum wage is R$1,621 a month, roughly $300 in U.S. dollars. The average salary sits around R$3,200, about $615. But averages flatter the picture: the median monthly income is closer to R$1,900, around $365, meaning half of employed Brazilians earn less than that. And roughly two in five work informally, with no contract, no benefits, and no security.

Now set a skilled remote role beside that. A professional earning, say, $1,000 a month working for a U.S. company is taking home more than three times the Brazilian minimum wage, and close to three times what the median worker earns. That's not a marginal bump. It's the difference between getting by and getting ahead: a home, an education for the kids, a parent's medical bills covered, savings that didn't exist before.

And it's paid in dollars. In economies where the local currency can lose value quickly, a salary that holds its worth isn't a small thing, it's stability that's genuinely hard to find any other way. The paycheck doesn't just buy more. It stays reliable while everything around it doesn't.

The resumes on my desk

When the opportunity is this good, it's bound to attract genuinely accomplished people. In my interviews I've sat across from trained lawyers, dentists, and engineers, professionals who could practice their original field but find that a remote role with a U.S. company offers more, and a better daily life, than their own profession does at home.

One has stayed with me longer than the rest. John Silveira, from Brazil, is a licensed commercial pilot. He was flying passenger aircraft for a living. He chose to become a virtual assistant instead, and today he's thriving as an executive assistant for Rich Nesbitt at Johnnie Walker Insurance in upstate New York, where he's listed on the team page alongside their six other Elevate assistants.

Sit with the geography of that for a second. A pilot in Brazil, an agency in upstate New York, working together every day as though they were down the hall. Ten years ago that match didn't exist for either of them. I got to make it.

The part of John's story that gave me pause is worth being honest about, though: it says something hard about how those economies reward their own talent. We didn't create that reality, and no single company can fix it. What we can do is offer one of the best options available inside it, and the caliber of people who sit down across from me tells you everything about how good an option it is.

There's no ceiling on this model

I tell every candidate I interview that there's no ceiling here, that this can be a career rather than a placement. I can say it with a straight face because of Gaby.

Gabriela Rodriguez is our Head of Operations. In 2017 she was a virtual assistant in Venezuela earning a dollar an hour, paid in bolívares, at a company that had nothing to do with Elevate, which didn't exist yet. She had taught herself English from YouTube videos and had never held a full conversation in it before her first interview.

She was placed with Stan Meytin, now our co-founder and then running a production company in New York. What happened next is the part I think about. Every time she was handed something, she finished it and came back asking for more. Marketing, finance, the website, whatever appeared. When the pandemic wiped that business out overnight, Stan kept her on before he even knew what the next company would be.

When Stan and our other co-founder, Dom Piccirillo, started Elevate Teams, Gaby was there from the first logo. She has sat in nearly every seat in the company: marketing, finance, account management, the email campaigns that landed our first clients. Today she leads operations, sits on our leadership team, and is the person most of our VAs across Latin America look up to.

So when a candidate asks me where this goes, I don't reach for a slogan. I tell them about Gaby.

What working from home gives back

A great salary is only half the story. The other half is the shape of the day, and it comes up in my interviews constantly, usually before anyone mentions money.

1. Hours returnedCommuting in much of Latin America is punishing. In São Paulo, residents lose around 257 hours a year to traffic, the equivalent of ten full days, and most spend up to two hours a day getting to and from work, with people in the outer neighborhoods losing closer to three. Working from home hands all of that back. Not as idle time, but as hours returned to rest, health, and family.
2. Being there for their kidsThis is the one that matters most to the people I talk to. Across much of the region, childcare is scarce, costly, and precarious, with public daycare in short supply and long waiting lists, leaving families to patch together informal care or face an impossible choice between keeping a job and caring for their children. Latin America carries some of the steepest motherhood penalties in the world, careers that stall or end the moment a child arrives. Working from home dissolves that trade-off. A parent can be there for the school pickup, the fever, the ordinary daily moments, and keep building a career and an income at the same time. They don't have to choose between their kids and their work. They get both.
3. A safer dayFor many, especially the women I interview, working from home lifts a real safety burden, since in a number of major Latin American cities the daily commute itself is something to navigate with genuine caution.

Put it together and remote work isn't a lesser version of real employment. For a great many people it's a better life than anything else on offer: more money, more time, more presence, more peace of mind. That's why they don't just take these jobs. They stay in them, build real careers, and tell their friends. A good share of the candidates who reach me were referred by someone already on our team.

Hear it from them

You don't have to take my word for any of this. Here are two of our team members telling their own story.

Raine on finding her balanceWatch on Instagram Alejandro on getting his day backWatch on Instagram

Not a stranger in a dark room

There's a picture people carry around about offshore work: someone anonymous in a windowless room, processing tasks for a company that will never learn their name.

That isn't what this is, and the clearest proof is what our clients do without anyone asking them to.

Martina's agency flew her from Argentina to the United States in 2025 to join them at the HawkSoft conference, held on a cruise ship. Not as a reward or a photo opportunity. Because she's part of the team, and the team was going.

Andrea, one of Dom's own assistants, flew up for Mike Stromsoe's UPP Grand Mastermind Conference in 2025, and ended up in front of a room full of U.S. agency owners, walking them through her actual workday and everything she carries. Not a testimonial. Just the work, described by the person doing it.

These trips aren't an exception, they happen all the time. Agencies bring their assistants to conferences, to team retreats, to the office. They add them to the meet-the-team page. They introduce them to clients by name, include them in bonuses, celebrate their anniversaries.

That's what integration actually looks like, and it's the difference between hiring a person and renting a function. It's also, selfishly, the best feedback I get. When an agency flies someone across a hemisphere to stand next to them in a photo, I know the match worked.

A win-win-win

Allen Hudson runs Community Risk Advisors and has been working with us for over three years. He now has eleven Elevate assistants, and his very first one has become integral to the team, training his new hires. On our podcast, he put it better than I could:

Eleven people. Three years. The first one now training the newest. That isn't a queue of task-takers moving through a revolving door. That's a team, built one match at a time.

We're a global company ourselves

We don't ask our clients to do anything we don't do.

Elevate Teams is built the same way we build theirs. Our people are spread across the United States and across Latin America, working together every day on the same calls, the same projects, the same goals. Venezuela, Brazil, Nicaragua, Mexico, Colombia, California, Florida, New York City. Once a year, the whole company gets together in person.

We're not a U.S. company that outsources. We're a company that happens to exist in a lot of places at once, which is a genuinely new thing to be able to be, and one of the better developments of the last decade.

So, is it "cheap labor"?

This is the real question under the ethics of hiring a virtual assistant, and I'd rather answer it than dodge it. "Cheap" is the wrong lens, because it measures the wage against the wrong country. By the only yardstick that matters to the person earning it, this is excellent, life-changing pay for dignified work they chose over real alternatives, including, in John's case, flying commercial aircraft.

And the surest sign is the simplest one: people stay. Our retention sits at 91% across all placements.

The honest test of any arrangement like this is whether it's genuinely good for the person on the other end:

• Fair, reliable pay by their standards
• Freely chosen
• A better day than the alternative
• A real path forward rather than a dead end

Hold it to that bar, and this isn't something to feel uneasy about. It's something to feel good about.

That's exactly how we built Elevate Teams, and it's why we say we place people, not tasks. Every match is a win on your side of the desk. It's also, on the other side, a genuinely better life: more income, more time, and the freedom to be home for the people who matter. I've never once had to choose between those two things when making a match. That's the whole point.

Meet the people behind the word.

Every match is a win on your side of the desk, and a better life on the other. See how we place people, not tasks.

Meet the talent