Why Are You Paying a Specialist to Do Admin?

Business Growth & Support

20 Oct

Written By Clare Lucas

There's a side to outsourcing and business efficiency that I don't think organisations look at often enough.

We talk a lot about founders doing things they should have handed over years ago.

But sometimes the problem isn't the founder.

Sometimes it's your most skilled and most expensive people.

I've seen highly experienced people spending significant chunks of their week booking meetings, formatting documents, manually updating spreadsheets, chasing information, organising diaries and carrying out routine administration.

All of that work needs doing.

That's not the issue.

The question is:

Does it need to be done by them?

Because if you're paying somebody for specialist expertise but a large part of their week is disappearing into operational tasks, you're not really getting the capacity you're paying for.

And it happens far more easily than you might think.

How highly skilled people end up doing the wrong work

Usually, nobody deliberately decides that the most experienced person in the organisation should spend Thursday afternoon sorting a spreadsheet.

It happens gradually.

Something needs doing.

They're there.

They know how to do it.

Doing it themselves seems quicker than finding somebody else, explaining it or creating a process.

So they do it.

Ten minutes here.

Twenty minutes there.

Half an hour sorting something before a meeting.

Another hour chasing information for a report.

Individually, none of those things feels particularly significant.

But multiply them across a week, a month and an entire organisation and you can end up with a very expensive administrator.

Busy doesn't necessarily mean productive

This is where I think businesses need to look beyond whether everybody is busy.

You can have a team that's working incredibly hard and still not be using its capacity particularly well.

If you're paying somebody for specialist expertise, I want as much of their available time as possible being used on the work you hired them to do.

Your senior consultant should be consulting.

Your fundraiser should be fundraising.

Your CEO should be leading.

Your salesperson should be selling.

Your creative should be creating.

Your project manager should be managing projects.

That sounds ridiculously obvious when it's written down.

But look closely inside most organisations and you'll probably find highly skilled people spending a surprising amount of time on work that doesn't require their expertise.

The problem isn't that the operational work is unimportant.

Quite the opposite.

It's important enough to make sure somebody actually owns it.

The hidden cost isn't just their hourly rate

When I talk about this with organisations, I don't think purely in terms of what that person's time costs.

There's also an opportunity cost.

If your salesperson spends three hours doing administration, that's three hours they aren't selling.

If your fundraiser spends half a day formatting documents and updating spreadsheets, that's half a day they aren't developing relationships or finding funding opportunities.

If your business owner spends every Friday sorting operational issues, that's time they aren't spending on strategy, clients, partnerships or growth.

And if your senior people are constantly pulled into lower-level operational work, it can create another problem.

The work only they can do starts getting squeezed around the edges.

It gets done later.

It gets rushed.

Or it doesn't happen at all.

So before deciding you need more senior capacity, it's worth asking whether you're using the specialist capacity you already have properly.

Do a quick capacity check

Here's something simple you can do.

Choose one key person in your organisation — and yes, that person can be you.

Look at what they actually did last week.

Not their job description.

Not what they're supposed to spend their time doing.

What did they really do?

Then put the work into three groups:

Only they can do this.

This is the work that genuinely requires their expertise, experience, authority or relationships.

Someone else could do this.

The work matters, but it doesn't need that particular person to do it.

This shouldn't be done like this at all.

These are the repetitive tasks, duplicated processes and manual work that might need changing, simplifying or automating rather than delegating.

That exercise can be incredibly revealing.

Because sometimes what looks like a capacity problem is actually a resource allocation problem.

You don't necessarily need another full-time employee

This is where fractional business support can be particularly useful for SMEs, charities and growing organisations.

You might recognise immediately that 20 hours of somebody's month could be handed over.

But that doesn't automatically mean you have a full-time job to fill.

Perhaps you need 15 hours of administrative support this month and 30 next month.

Perhaps you need regular operational support every week, but marketing expertise only around a campaign.

Perhaps you need somebody to manage a project for three months and then you won't need that capability again until next year.

Perhaps there are several small areas that require different skills.

This is where traditional thinking about resourcing can become restrictive.

We tend to think:

"We have work that needs doing, therefore we need another person."

But the better question might be:

"What capability do we need, how much of it do we need and for how long?"

That's a very different conversation.

Your needs fluctuate. Your resource can too.

One of the biggest advantages of fractional and outsourced business support is flexibility.

Instead of trying to create a permanent role around a fluctuating workload, you can build support around what the organisation actually needs.

There may be a core level of regular support and then additional expertise brought in when required.

That could mean administration, marketing, project management, CRM support, events, bookkeeping, systems or another specialist skill.

And importantly, those things don't all have to be done by the same person.

That's how we've built Ducks In A Row.

We have a multi-skilled team because our clients don't conveniently have one type of problem requiring one type of expertise for exactly the same number of hours every month.

Real organisations don't work like that.

Their needs change.

Projects start and finish.

Busy periods come and go.

Priorities shift.

Growth creates different challenges.

The support should be able to change with them.

Good outsourcing isn't about finding the cheapest pair of hands

This is another distinction I think matters.

The goal isn't simply to move lower-value work to the cheapest possible person.

It's about putting the right work with the right capability.

Sometimes that's an experienced administrator who can take complete ownership of a process and run it far more efficiently than a senior manager dipping in and out of it.

Sometimes it's a specialist.

Sometimes it's technology.

Sometimes it's improving the process before anybody takes responsibility for it.

And sometimes, once you really examine the work, you realise it doesn't need doing at all.

That's why I don't think strategic outsourcing begins with:

"What can we hand over?"

It begins with understanding how the organisation currently uses its people.