Meet the founder behind Desert VA and see why we built a managed virtual assistant service for UAE businesses — our story, mission and vision.
Ben Paglinawan spent more than sixteen years in business operations, sales and customer experience before starting DesertVA. Across that time, one problem kept showing up: growing businesses kept getting held back by how slow and expensive it is to hire locally.
That includes a stretch generating more than AED 100 million in sales, working close enough to operations to know what actually makes a support team useful and what just adds overhead. DesertVA is built on that experience. Today it supports businesses across the UAE and beyond with virtual assistants who are sourced, trained and managed end-to-end, not just placed and left to sort things out.
That experience wasn't confined to one industry — it spanned several sectors and included leading teams directly, not just setting strategy from a distance. That distinction matters here: placing a virtual assistant is the easy part. Building one a business can actually rely on day to day is a different skill, and it's the one DesertVA was built around.
Sixteen-plus years in regional operations. AED 100M+ in sales generated along the way.
