Firing a Cold-Calling VA Who Isn’t Performing: What to Check Before You Do

A Struggling VA Is a Pattern, Not a Personal Failure

It is easy to read a VA’s slipping numbers as proof of a bad hire, a bad screening process, or a bad decision to outsource in the first place. HR Acuity’s Tenth Annual Employee Relations Benchmark Study, covering 274 US organizations with 1,000 or more employees and representing 8.8 million employees, found formal performance issues rose 27% year over year to an average of 50.1 issues per 1,000 employees in 2025. That is a rising, documented, industry wide pattern, not evidence that any one hiring decision was uniquely wrong.

What a Real Performance Improvement Plan Requires

The standard process before a termination decision is a performance improvement plan, and the norms around it are specific: a PIP should run a minimum of 30 days, though 60 or 90 days is more customary, with weekly or biweekly check-ins during that window rather than a single conversation at the start and another at the end. That cadence exists so the person has real chances to correct course and real, documented evidence exists either way by the time a final decision gets made.

A cold-calling VA’s performance is unusually easy to document against this standard, since dial counts, contact rates, and booked appointments are already tracked numbers, not subjective impressions, which makes the check-in conversations concrete rather than vague.

The Checklist Before You Pull the Trigger

Before ending a VA’s contract over performance, confirm four things are actually in place: a documented performance improvement plan that ran at least 30 days, ideally 60 to 90; weekly or biweekly check-ins logged during that window, not just a memory of having talked about it; a clear, specific standard the VA was measured against, not a vague sense they "should be doing better"; and a real plan for who covers calls during the gap between letting one VA go and a replacement being fully ramped.

Missing any of the first three turns a defensible performance decision into a rushed one. Missing the fourth turns a defensible decision into a costly one, since the seller calls that VA would have made do not happen while a replacement gets trained.

What Happens If You Skip the Documentation Step

Terminating without a documented PIP does not just remove the VA’s chance to improve, it removes your own paper trail if the decision is ever questioned, whether by the VA, an agency partner, or in a dispute over the working arrangement. Given that formal performance issues are already rising 27% year over year industrywide, per HR Acuity’s research, this is exactly the kind of decision more owners are facing more often, and the ones handling it with a documented process are the ones with a defensible record if anything about the termination gets challenged later.

Replacing the VA Without Losing the Weeks It Takes to Ramp a New One

The real cost of firing an underperforming VA is rarely the termination itself, it is the gap afterward: weeks where seller calls are not happening while a replacement gets sourced, trained, and ramped. That gap is exactly what backup coverage planning exists to close before it becomes an emergency, not after.

VA Horizon’s calling operation is built around structured coverage rather than one irreplaceable caller: a trained VA bench does the dialing, an in-house SDR qualifies every seller who responds, and a follow-up system keeps working the rest, so a performance decision does not have to mean a calling gap while a replacement comes up to speed.

Sources

The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.

• PR Newswire (HR Acuity), "Workplace Risk Is Rising Faster Than Companies Can Respond"
• SHRM, "8 Steps for Effective Performance Improvement Plans"

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