He Placed 30 Overseas Assistants With Blue-Collar Businesses and Made R1.63 Million ($100,000) in 100 Days. Would It Work in SA?

Alex Kirby built Bridgeway Global Staffing, an agency that finds skilled remote workers and places them with US blue-collar business owners (plumbers, landscapers, electricians) drowning in admin. He started with about R3,260 ($200) and did R1.63 million ($100,000) in sales in his first 100 days.

The idea

Kirby had years of experience hiring overseas virtual assistants for his own businesses and noticed the same pattern every time: skilled, English-speaking, hard-working people in Latin America earning far less than US staff for the same work. He built a placement agency around that insight. He sources and vets candidates himself (a video application is mandatory before he'll even consider someone), matches them to small business owners who need admin, dispatch, or marketing support, and charges a one-time placement fee. A paid membership adds ongoing training and cuts future placement fees. His whole tech stack cost him about R3,260 ($200) a month, built with the no-code tool Lovable plus QuickBooks. Ninety percent of his clients were hiring for the first time, not replacing existing staff.

Business fit breakdown

• Skills required: Recruiting/People is the core skill, sourcing and vetting candidates yourself is the entire job, there's no shortcut. Sales matters for landing the first clients (cold outreach to business owners you know). Marketing is minor here, most growth comes from referrals once you have a track record.
• Time commitment: Full-time to start, because vetting candidates properly (video applications, interviews, reference checks) is slow work that doesn't compress well. Once you have a pipeline of pre-vetted candidates, it could shift to part-time.
• Execution difficulty: The hard part isn't technical, it's judgment. Telling a strong candidate from a weak one on a video call, and matching them to the right business owner, takes reps to get good at. No licensing or specialized tools required.
• Go-to-market: Warm outreach (friends, family, church, community) works well in SA's relationship-driven SME culture, same as the video's subject used in the US. The harder part is convincing a first-time client to trust a stranger with hiring, that takes proof (a discounted first placement) more than pitching.
• Revenue potential: At 15-25% of a local admin salary (roughly R96,000-R120,000/year for the role), a single placement nets R15,000-R25,000. A handful of placements a month once the pipeline is running lands comfortably in the R50k-R200k/month tier.

Would it work in SA?

South Africa already has an established domestic VA placement industry (VAConnect, Cherry Assistant, RecruitMyMom, HireSava), with standard recruitment fees of 15-25% of first-year salary. For a local admin hire, that's a placement fee closer to R15,000-R25,000, not the R70,000+ a straight dollar conversion of the US figures would suggest. None of the established SA players appear to specifically target blue-collar trade businesses (plumbers, electricians, landscapers) the way the video's subject does, that's the identifiable gap.

Source: He Placed 30 Overseas Assistants With Blue-Collar Businesses and Made R1.63 Million ($100,000) in 100 Days. Would It Work in SA? — Chris Koerner, The Koerner Office Podcast