Uassist.ME and the art of being elsewhere

Alfredo Atanacio needed an assistant. He was travelling between Miami and San Salvador, working in his family’s apparel business, and discovering that a working life generates a second working life: appointments to arrange, messages to answer, invoices to chase. He tried virtual assistants in India and the Philippines. In his telling, the language and cultural friction frustrated him. The experiment produced a business idea. Why not hire people in El Salvador?

The assistant was the experiment

Uassist.ME began in San Salvador in 2009. Its early assistants handled appointments, travel, transcription and invoice collection in English or Spanish. Facebook, Twitter and outsourcing forums supplied the first marketing channels. By the time Inc. profiled the founders in 2012, customers included real estate agents, law offices and executives accustomed to having help.

One detail in that early account deserves a raised eyebrow: customers in India hired Uassist.ME to help serve their American customers. The direction of outsourcing was apparently negotiable. What mattered was the match between the worker and the work. Atanacio and co-founder Rodolfo Schildknecht had found a market for familiarity as well as labor.

Distance is a management problem

Today the company supplies remote business support from El Salvador, with a U.S. base in Miami Beach. Its customers range from entrepreneurs to organizations with substantial support operations. The public service menu includes executive assistance, bookkeeping, sales support, marketing, recruitment and e-commerce administration. A larger business can buy contact-center teams handling calls, chat, email, technical support and specialized intake.

The nearshore proposition has two practical parts: bilingual English-Spanish work and hours that overlap with North America. An unanswered question can hold up an otherwise simple task. Working at the same time lets the question travel back while someone is still available to answer it. Geography helps, although an overlapping shift can be arranged elsewhere too. El Salvador’s clock also differs from U.S. Eastern time; compatible working hours do the useful work here.

Uassist.ME sits between freelance hiring and a fully staffed internal department. Buyers can obtain a dedicated specialist, or a managed operation with supervisors, quality checks and reporting. Those are different purchases. An assistant needs someone to set priorities. A managed team also needs agreed service levels, a way to measure them and authority to correct the process.

The $300 question

The homepage makes that distinction unusually concrete. Its advertised junior full-time starting prices are $1,900 a month for “You Manage” and $2,200 for “We Manage.” The latter adds supervision, coaching and quality assurance. That $300 gap prices a question every buyer should ask: who will notice when the work starts going sideways?

These are starting prices, not universal tariffs. The pricing page shows a full-time bookkeeping example at $2,360 a month. Managed BPO pricing is scoped separately. The homepage quotes Spanish customer service from $7.75 per productive hour and bilingual service from $12.50. Training is billed at 85% of the productive rate.

VA engagements are advertised as monthly with 30 days’ cancellation notice. The published terms also contain a non-solicitation clause and restrictions on refunds after the initial trial. Read the agreement alongside the sales page. The economic comparison should include your own supervision time, the required training and the actual workload. A low rate attached to an ill-defined job can become an expensive habit.

Soda has a paperwork problem

Poppi’s bright cans conceal a less photogenic business: invoices, purchase orders, deductions and reconciliation. In Uassist.ME’s account of the relationship, six full-time business assistants support the beverage company’s finance work. They process invoices in Concur, investigate pricing discrepancies and vendor claims, and handle accounting activity in NetSuite, including transactions associated with Amazon, Shopify and Walmart.

The company reports 1,297 invoices processed per month and 1,497 credit memos created per month. It records 99.9% accuracy in April 2025 and 100% in May and June. Those are company-reported results for particular periods, rather than a promise that every future ledger will be flawless.

The interesting part is the system around the numbers. The team helped with Poppi’s NetSuite adoption, provided internal support and training, and used monthly performance reviews and structured updates. Sending work abroad did not remove the need to understand the accounting tools. It made that understanding part of the purchased service.

The shoe retailer needed a better timetable

ALDO Canada’s problems, as described in its case study, included agent turnover, limited visibility into performance and inefficient scheduling. More people would not automatically solve any of those. A retailer can have enough agents in total and still have too few available when customers call.

Uassist.ME describes changes to candidate profiles, targeted questioning, a team-lead observation form, customer-feedback analysis and workforce planning. It reports 89% customer satisfaction and all KPIs reached within two months. The observation form gave coaching a repeatable starting point; scheduling and forecasting gave staffing decisions something firmer than instinct.

The transferable idea is modest enough to be useful. Before adding headcount, look at when demand arrives, what agents do, and which observations reach the person coaching them. A spreadsheet can be less exciting than a hiring announcement and considerably more relevant to the queue.

“Thanks to the Uassist.ME team, we have been able to keep up with our 14-hour SLA.”Omar Jenblat · CEO & founder, BusySeed · company-published testimonial

Give the handoff a name

At HKM Employment Attorneys, rising inquiry volume put pressure on intake. Uassist.ME says the engagement grew from six bilingual receptionists to 24 intake specialists. The team qualified inquiries before passing them to attorneys and used CRM-integrated templates to capture consistent information. The reported outcome was 6,600 intakes a month and 59.5% total cost savings.

In property management, the RMR case describes bilingual reservationists answering calls and emails about availability, leasing terms and amenities. Uassist.ME also helped integrate Amelia’s AI call routing and supported a migration to Funnel CRM. People, scripts and systems shared the job. The company reports a 6.9% lead-to-lease conversion rate for that engagement.

Score Capital’s example is smaller and rather revealing. Uassist.ME analyzed call recordings and revised the openings of sales calls around the audience, relevant value and a clear next step. It reports a 19% increase in conversion rates. The initial problem was weak engagement. Making more calls with the same opening would have multiplied the original problem very efficiently.

One assistant can become an operation

Community.co began working with Uassist.ME in 2012 with one part-time assistant. Its retrospective describes expansion into administrative support, a three-tier lead-generation team and creative design. Slack, HubSpot and Canva appear in the daily work. The relationship shows how a narrow assignment can open the door to related functions once both sides understand the business.

That expansion still requires preparation. Uassist.ME’s BPO implementation plan runs through discovery, curriculum development, hiring and training, supervised live work, a pilot and steady-state operation. The indicative schedule for a standard program extends to roughly ten weeks or more. Its quicker hiring milestones should not be confused with a fully mature operation.

The founders encountered their own delegation problem. In a 2022 interview with Estrategia & Negocios, Atanacio described stepping away from Uassist.ME’s operations as a difficult decision, while welcoming experienced leadership to help organize rapid growth. A company selling assistance had reached the point where its founders needed to let others run more of it.

Its stated employment practices include a 44-hour workweek, compensation for overtime and night shifts, and employee feedback channels. Its values include empathy and commitment. Those statements matter to an outsourcing buyer because continuity carries knowledge: who knows the client’s exceptions, who remembers a disputed invoice, who can train the next person?

Even the robots need clean paperwork

Uassist.ME’s newer catalog includes AI-ready data, prototype hardening and process automation. The data service connects systems, builds pipelines and establishes usable schemas. Prototype work adds security reviews, monitoring and documentation. Automation work maps recurring processes and tests the exceptions before launch. These are advertised capabilities; the older client cases should not be treated as evidence for every new offer.

The connection to staffing is sensible. A person cannot reliably reconcile contradictory records; an automated workflow inherits the same difficulty at greater speed. Clean data and documented ownership make both kinds of work easier to inspect.

For a prospective customer, the lesson is to begin with one repeatable function, define a successful output and specify when an exception must return to you. Measure the queue before the engagement and again afterward. Remote support fits work that can be explained, accessed securely and reviewed. It fits less comfortably when the task requires physical presence or when every decision depends on knowledge nobody has written down. Uassist.ME can supply capable hands. The buyer must still decide what those hands are authorized to do.