Executive Assistant for a Canadian Marketing Agency (Full-Time, Graveyard Shift, Long-Term)

About us

Agency Atom is a small marketing agency based in Ontario, Canada. We do email and SMS marketing for e-commerce brands — the automated email s you get after you abandon a cart, the weekly promotional sends, all of it. Right now the agency is one person: me. I write the copy, design the email s, run the client accounts, and handle everything else. The everything else is why I'm hiring.

This is the first hire. You'd be building the admin side of this business with me rather than slotting into a system someone else made.

What you'd do

This is a graveyard shift. Read that part again before you keep reading, because it's the one people skip.

The hours are 11:00 AM to 7:00 PM Eastern Time, which is where I am in Ontario, Canada. In Manila time that's:

Now through early November: 11:00 PM to 7:00 AM
November through mid-March: 12:00 AM to 8:00 AM

The Philippines doesn't do daylight saving and Canada does, so the shift moves by one hour twice a year. I'll always give you a week's notice before it changes.

The reason I want these hours is simple: I'm awake and working the entire time you are. You won't sit blocked on a question for twelve hours waiting for me to wake up. Ask, get an answer, keep moving. Every hour you work, I'm reachable.

Night differential is included in the pay — details below.

The work:

• Email inbox management. Sort what comes in, clear the noise, draft replies, flag what actually needs me.

• Upwork applications. I'll give you scripts. You find the jobs that fit my agency, match them to the right script, fill in the details, and send the application. This is the biggest part of the job, and the first two hours of every shift.

• Invoicing. Create and send client invoices in Airwallex, log them, follow up on late ones.

• Bookkeeping admin — the monthly close. This is the biggest part of the job after Upwork. Every month I export my bank transactions and hand them to you. You collect every receipt and invoice the business received (some arrive by email , some you download from a vendor's website), rename them to a strict format, file them in Google Drive, then match every bank transaction to its document. From there you fill in my bookkeeping spreadsheet in Google Sheets and carry the month into my year-end accounting worksheet. Then you tell me what balanced and what's missing. I've built the spreadsheets and I'll give you a written list of expense categories to work from. You're applying my system, not designing one — and anything that doesn't fit the list gets flagged to me instead of guessed at. This is careful, detailed number work. If that sounds tedious rather than satisfying, this job will grind on you.

• CRM. We use Clarify. When you have a conversation with someone on Upwork or LinkedIn, you record it against that person in Clarify. Email records itself automatically, so it's just those two channels. I'll show you how — it takes fifteen minutes to learn.

• Calendar. Booking, rescheduling, protecting my focus time.

• Social posting and outreach. I write the posts and the messages, and I give you the list of people to contact. You publish and send on schedule, and track who replies.

• Client group chats. WhatsApp, mostly. Confirm you've seen a message, tell them when I'll answer, pass it to me. You don't answer their questions.

• Filing. Receipts and documents into Google Drive, following a naming system I'll show you.

What I need from you:

• Fluent spoken English. This is my single biggest requirement. We'll be talking every day, and I need you to understand me the first time and answer without me rephrasing. Writing matters less than people think — small spelling and grammar slips are easy to fix. Being able to actually hold a conversation is not something I can fix, so I'm testing for it before anything else. See the application steps below.

• Full-time, 40 hours a week, on the schedule above. This is not flexible and it's the whole design of the job. If you can't work nights sustainably, please don't apply — I'd rather you tell me now than burn out in month two.

• Reliable internet and a computer that isn't shared. If your connection drops at 3 AM, the workday stops.

• Comfort following a security setup exactly — VPN on before certain work, off after, log in and out of accounts at set times. I'll show you how. It's not complicated, but it has to be done the same way every single day.

• You follow instructions exactly, and you ask when something isn't covered. Both matter. I'd rather answer a question than fix a guess.

• You keep your own notes. If I explain something once, I shouldn't be explaining it again in three weeks.

• Honesty when something goes wrong. Mistakes are fine, hidden mistakes are not.

One thing to be clear about:

• You won't be writing the content, the messages, or the sales proposals. I write all of that. Your job is to take what I've written and make sure it actually goes out — correctly, on schedule, every single day.

• Some people find that boring. Other people are very good at it and know it's a real skill. I'm looking for the second kind. If you want a role where you're coming up with the marketing ideas, this isn't it, and you'd be unhappy here.

What I DON'T need:

• Marketing experience. You won't be working inside client accounts at all — I handle every piece of the actual marketing work myself.

• An accounting background or any qualification. The bookkeeping here is data entry against a system I've already built and a category list I've already written. If you've done bookkeeping before it's a small plus, but I'm not looking for an accountant.

• Experience with Airwallex, Clarify, or any tool on this list.

• A degree.

What actually matters:

• You speak English well, you're careful with detail, can follow instructions, and you do the same thing the same way every day.

• I've had good people pass on jobs like this because they didn't think they were qualified. If that's you, apply anyway.

The offer:

$600 USD every four weeks. Note that's every four weeks, not monthly — it works out to 13 payments a year rather than 12, so there's an extra payment built into the schedule.

This is an independent contractor role, not employment. You invoice me each cycle, you're responsible for your own taxes, and there's no Canadian payroll involved. Be clear-eyed about that before applying.

Because the cycle is four weeks rather than calendar months, your pay date moves through the month rather than landing on the same date each time.

Time off: we'll agree a number of days up front and your pay doesn't change in a cycle where you take them. I'm not going to nickel-and-dime you over holidays.

Long-term. I'm hiring someone I expect to still be working with in three years, and as the agency grows this role grows with it.

How to apply:

Applications must complete everything or get skipped — why? Because the job is following detailed instructions carefully, and this is the first test of that.

The form. Fill out this questionnaire: ----------

[INSIDE THE FORM] A short recording.

This is the most important part of your application, because spoken English is the thing I most need to verify. Record yourself on video or audio — your phone is fine, no editing, one take is fine:

Read this paragraph out loud:

"Good morning. I've finished the monthly close for March. There were forty-two transactions on the bank statement and I matched all but three of them to receipts. The three I couldn't match are a charge from Upwork on March eighth for sixty-two dollars, a subscription renewal on March nineteenth, and one payment where the vendor's name doesn't appear anywhere in my records."

Shortlisted applicants get a paid test task — about 90 minutes of real work, paid whether or not you get the job.