Offshore, onshore, and the management tax

The cheapest seat in outbound stickers at $1,500 to $3,500 a month: an offshore staffing arrangement, one rep, your playbook. Against an in-house seat at roughly $10,000 fully loaded, the line item looks unbeatable. It is also incomplete, because the staffing model quietly moves several jobs from the invoice onto your calendar, and the sticker never mentions them.

What the staffing sticker leaves out

A staffing provider supplies a person. Everything that makes the person productive stays with you. The strategy: who to call, with what message, against which signals. The tooling: data, dialer, sequencer, CRM seats, a stack that runs ten to fifteen thousand dollars a year even for a small team, the sprawl we audited in April. The training: your product, your objections, your qualification bar. And the management: call reviews, coaching, list decisions, pipeline hygiene, in practice about five hours a week of somebody senior's time. That is the management tax, and it comes due every week whether or not anyone budgeted it.

Pricing the five hours

Five hours a week is a fifth to an eighth of a working week, depending on how honestly you count your weeks. Take a founder or a sales leader whose time is worth $150 to $250 an hour to the business, conservatively, and the tax runs $3,000 to $5,000 a month. Add the tooling at $800 to $1,250 a month and the arithmetic changes shape: the $2,000 seat is a $6,000 to $8,000 program. Still cheaper than in-house at roughly $10,000, but no longer in a different category, and that is before pricing what the five hours were displaced from, which for a founder is usually closing.

There is a second cost that is harder to see on a spreadsheet. The five hours are the program's ceiling. When your week gets loud, the management is what slips, and an unmanaged rep with a list produces activity, not meetings. The staffing model does not just cost your time. It makes your time the single point of failure.

The honest comparison

None of this makes offshore staffing wrong. For a company with a working playbook, spare management capacity, and a stack already paid for, it can be the rational tier, a fit we mapped honestly in the rent-build-or-automate piece. The failure mode is choosing it on sticker price while owning none of those three things, then discovering the missing pieces one Tuesday at a time.

The comparison that holds up is total program cost: fee, plus tooling you still carry, plus your hours at their real rate, divided by held meetings. Run that way, the tiers get much closer than their stickers suggest, and sometimes they reorder.

Where we sit

CommandVA prices at $3,499 a month, published on the pricing page, above the staffing tier on purpose. The difference is that the strategy, the tooling, the training, and the management layer are inside the fee: a named US-hours rep arrives with the system attached, the list scored, and the weekly reporting running, so the five hours stay yours. If you are comparing tiers right now, book a strategy call and bring your hourly rate. We will run the total-cost math on every option, including the ones cheaper than us.