Virtual assistants (VA) are trained, off-site professionals who handle the myriad niggling business details that keep you from focusing on the work you love.

Many were once regular administrative assistants who now work as freelancers. Others learn administrative work through a credentialing organization. And still others are professional writers, bookkeepers, Web designers, marketers and so forth who promote themselves as virtual assistants.

The difference is mostly emphasis. Those focusing primarily on admin tasks may offer a specialty niche as well. People specializing in their own expertise, such as Web design, might tackle administrative work on occasion as well.

What they have in common is working from their own locations—often across the country from clients—via e-mail, computer, phone, fax and mail. You can develop a daily working relationship with a VA, but you will probably never meet her (most are women).

Because VAs work from their own offices and are independent business owners, you don’t supply office equipment, software or desk space. And you don’t pay benefits such as FICA taxes, health insurance or vacations. That’s their responsibility.

You pay only for the time they actually work for you, maybe just 10 to 15 hours a month. How do they make a living, then? By having lots of “virtual clients” like you.

David Goldsmith, whose Goldsmith Group manages authors, speakers and consultants in Santa Fe, N.M., has worked for five years with a VA who lives in a tiny town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

“I could care less where she lives,” Goldsmith says. “She’s available when I need her, and that’s what matters. There’s hardly anything I can imagine that she hasn’t been able to do from the middle of nowhere.”