Should you hire another admin person — or fix the system they'd be typing into?

There's a moment every growing business hits: the office is visibly drowning, mistakes are creeping in, your best admin person looks exhausted, and the obvious answer presents itself — we need another pair of hands.

Sometimes that's exactly right. But it's worth twenty minutes of honest thinking first, because an admin hire is a £30,000-a-year decision that renews itself annually, and in a lot of growing businesses it buys you eighteen months before you're back at the same moment, hiring again.

What a £26k admin salary actually costs

The advertised salary is the smallest number involved. Add employer's National Insurance, pension contributions, holiday cover, a desk and equipment, software licences, and — the one everyone forgets — management time: recruiting, training, checking, and re-doing. A "£26k hire" is realistically £32–35k a year of true cost. Every year. Rising.

That's not an argument against hiring. It's the number the alternative should be compared against — and it almost never is, because the hire feels urgent and the alternative feels vague.

The question that sorts it: judgment or transport?

Take a week and watch what your office actually does (or just list it — you already know). Every task falls into one of two piles:

• Judgment work: deciding whether to extend credit, handling an angry customer, negotiating with a supplier, spotting that an order looks wrong for this customer, knowing that this account needs a phone call not an email. Human work. Hire for this, gladly.
• Transport work: reading information in one place and putting it somewhere else. Retyping emailed orders into the system. Copying invoice details into a chasing email. Pulling numbers from five screens into the Monday report. Forwarding documents to the right person. Checking one list against another list.

Here's the uncomfortable pattern in most growing trade businesses: the office is 70–80% transport work, and the drowning feeling comes from transport volume growing with sales. Orders double, retyping doubles. But judgment work doesn't double — the number of genuinely hard decisions grows far slower than the paperwork does.

Which means the new hire, in practice, becomes another transport worker. You're not adding judgment to the business; you're adding a faster conveyor belt to a process that shouldn't be a conveyor belt at all.

The test, in one sentence

Would this job still exist if the information moved itself?

If most of the role you're about to advertise disappears under that question, you're about to pay £33k a year, forever, for something that has recently — genuinely recently, within the last couple of years — become the kind of thing software does reliably: reading documents, extracting what matters, putting it where it goes, and flagging anything unclear to a person.

When hiring is the right answer

To be clear about the other side, because it's real:

• When the pile is judgment work. If the backlog is quotes needing pricing decisions, accounts needing relationship attention, or customers needing actual conversations — hire. Software doesn't do this, whatever anyone selling it claims.
• When one person is a single point of failure. If only one human knows how anything works, a second human is resilience, not waste — though write the process down either way.
• When you need the hire and the fix. Often the honest answer is both: fix the transport work so the person you hire spends their day on work that needed a person. A £33k/year hire doing judgment work is a bargain. The same hire doing retyping is the most expensive data-entry system money can buy.

The arithmetic, side by side

	Another admin hire	Fixing the transport work
Cost shape	~£33k/yr, recurring, rises	One-off build, small running cost
Capacity	Fixed — drowns again as sales grow	Scales with volume
Errors	Human rate, gets worse when busy	Consistent; flags what it's unsure of
Holidays / notice	Real and recurring	None
What you gain	A person (judgment, flexibility, warmth)	Hours back for the people you already have

Neither column wins universally. The point is to run the comparison before signing the job ad — because one column compounds in your favour and the other compounds against you.

What to do before you post the job ad

1. List the office's tasks — an honest hour with whoever runs the office.
2. Mark each one J or T — judgment or transport.
3. Time the transport. Even roughly. Hours per week, multiplied out to a year.
4. Then decide. If the transport pile is small, hire with confidence. If it's most of the drowning — you now know exactly what to fix, and what it's worth.

That list — tasks, J/T, hours — is, almost exactly, what we build on a walk-through. If you'd rather have a second pair of eyes do it with you (free, and the plan's yours to keep either way), that's what we're for. And if your list says "hire," we'll tell you that too — it's a better outcome for us than building you something you didn't need.