We didn’t start IncludeWork on a whim; an incident pushed our CEO to build this agency. In our initial digital marketing startup, our CEO missed a critical investor deadline, costing us a big deal. The reason was not our lack of capability; rather, it was scattered data across multiple platforms. This was actually a “professional assistance crisis,” but it left us drowning in tasks for the next two weeks that had nothing to do with our business growth.

The incident seems small, but we lost a big investor. We have big ambitions for him to grow our business and build a reputable brand. At that moment, we realized that, as our core purpose is just to build a strong business, why shouldn’t we address this issue by building an expert, trustworthy, and committed AI-skilled virtual assistance force so that no one loses their dreams and meets the conditions we did?

This incident actually taught us that those building their businesses are not failing in their vision; they are failing in management. Usually, companies lack the time and advanced instructors to prepare candidates for practical, real-world scenarios. It's also hard for organizations to train their employees while focusing on business growth, which slows down the business operations and increases the costs.

They keep posting open vacancies after a few weeks and engage existing staff to conduct interviews, onboard new candidates, and train them on the organization’s tools and systems. But there is still no guarantee that the new candidate will perform as expected and stay longer. If they find more lucrative opportunities, they may switch there. Keeping all this in mind, we started IncludeWork with just 5 team members in 2012. Our mission was to offer virtual assistance services that ditch the marketing claim vs candidates' actual skills. As business owners, we already knew that, despite many challenges with the existing teams and hiring processes, businesses are hesitant to adopt AI-skilled virtual assistance due to concerns about data security and confidentiality. We understood their fear of long-term commitment, lack of responsiveness, and accountability issues.

That’s why we broke the barriers by introducing even 5 hours of assistance. They no longer needed to train anyone to make it capable of running their systems; our AI-enabled virtual assistant always remained ready to work, even from day one. Our first client was a luxury real estate seller from Dubai. He hired two of our team members for his company’s marketing needs. As they were trained on advanced technology, in just 3 months, they generated around 1200 leads organically, and, interestingly, around 350 of them were converted.

The owner was shocked by the result because in Dubai real estate, 350 lead conversions mean billions in profit, while our pricing packages were too affordable even for beginners. Realizing that we have strong capabilities to turn any lagging business into a growing one, we expanded our services from real estate to other sectors. Gradually, we build a workforce for multi-niche marketing, sales, social media, e-commerce, executive support, administrative support, and bookkeeping. Our business grew with the references of satisfied customers.

Over time, we invested in diversifying our skills, learned the tools of the time, and added quality control specialists to our team to ensure greater perfection in our projects. They reviewed every completed task and confirmed its compliance with the client’s requirements. Throughout the journey, we stayed flexible to make changes where needed. Today, our team consists of over 100 virtual assistants and 20 quality checkers. We have successfully served diverse industries in 76 countries. Now that we have achieved over 70% customer retention, we are proud of our idea, services, and what we have achieved so far.

We noted that hiring virtual assistants costs businesses about 80% less than traditional hires. It frees them from training burden, setup costs, and management issues. They no longer need to pay monthly salaries with long-term contracts; they can hire for specific hours and customized needs. Even if they feel dissatisfaction, we replace the candidate at no cost because IncludeWork knows that trust is earned.