Our Head of Commercial, Francesca Roberts, shares the insights from recent conversations with business owners and how to alleviate their concerns.

I’ve spoken to a lot of business owners in the past six months who are at the same point.

The team is stretched. Things are falling through the gaps. The to-do list has a permanent overflow section. The answer feels obvious: hire someone to take the load.

Before you post the job, spend ten minutes reading this.

Because in most cases, what’s actually happening isn’t that you’re short of a person. It’s that a chunk of your team’s time, and probably yours, is being eaten by tasks that shouldn’t take as long as they do.

Emails. Scheduling. Following up. Data entry. Copying information from one place to another. Writing the same thing in slightly different ways for different people.

That’s not a headcount problem. That’s a process problem. And right now, a lot of it can be solved without a hire.

What’s actually on the admin pile

Before you do anything else, write it down.

Not in your head. Actually write it down. What are the tasks that keep getting pushed to the bottom of the list? What does your team spend time on that doesn’t require real judgement, just time?

Most business owners, when they do this properly, find the same handful of categories.

Scheduling and coordination. Chasing people for information. Formatting and sending documents. Updating records. Answering questions that have been answered before.

These are solvable. Not perfectly, not overnight. But genuinely.

This is also the most useful thing you can do before any training, any tool purchase, or any conversation with a provider. If you don’t know where the time is going, you can’t fix it. Writing the list takes an hour. It frames your options in the reality of your business, and that’s important.

The tools that handle most of it

You don’t need a complex setup. You need the right tools pointed at the right problems.

For communication and writing: ChatGPT or Claude handles first drafts, email responses, meeting summaries, and anything where you’re starting from a blank page. If you’re not using a shared workspace version with your team yet, that’s the first move. Claude for Teams or ChatGPT Teams gives everyone access with shared context, so you’re not each reinventing the wheel.

For scheduling, tools like Calendly or TidyCal remove the back and forth entirely. One link. People book themselves in. Done.

For repetitive workflows: Zapier and Make connect your existing tools and automate the handoffs between them. A new enquiry comes in, it gets logged, a response goes out, a task gets created without anyone touching it.

For document generation: if you’re producing similar documents repeatedly, proposals, onboarding packs, reports, templates connected to a form or a simple automation can generate them in seconds rather than thirty minutes.

None of this requires technical knowledge to get started. It requires someone to spend a few hours setting it up properly. If your team hasn’t used these tools before, a short course focused on practical AI implementation for SMEs is often the fastest way to get everyone pointed in the right direction, without spending weeks on YouTube.

The part most people skip

Here’s where it usually falls apart.

People install the tools. They try them for a week. They don’t get great results. They give up.

The reason is almost always the same. They haven’t told the AI anything about their business.

AI tools work like a new team member. A new team member who knows nothing about your company, your clients, your tone, or your processes. You’d onboard a person. You need to onboard the AI.

That means creating a simple document, or a project inside Claude or a custom GPT, that explains who you are, what you do, how you communicate, and what good looks like. The more context you give it, the better the outputs.

Most businesses that do this properly are surprised by how quickly things improve. Not because the tools suddenly got smarter. Because they finally gave them something to work with.

This is the step that structured training makes significantly easier. Not because the tools are complicated, but because having someone walk your team through the setup, the prompting, and the onboarding process properly means you skip the two months of trial and error that most businesses go through on their own.

What this realistically gets you

Not perfection. Not a fully automated business. But meaningful time back.

If your team spends two hours a day on tasks that could be partially or fully automated, that’s ten hours a week. Across a team of five, that’s fifty hours. That’s more than a full-time hire, without the salary, the NI, the management overhead, or the risk.

It won’t all be automatable. Some of it will need a human. But the proportion that does is almost always smaller than people expect when they actually look at it properly.

If you want to go further than tools and start building proper automations across your workflows, that’s where an AI and automation apprentice changes things. Someone in your business whose job is to find those fifty hours, build the systems that recover them, and keep improving them over time. That’s a different level of investment. But it starts from exactly the same list you wrote at the beginning.

When a hire is still the right answer

Sometimes it is.

If the work genuinely requires human presence, relationship management, or judgment that can’t be replicated: hire for it.

If your team is dealing with volume that no automation can absorb, or if the customer experience depends on a real person being in the loop, hire for it.

But if you’re honest about the list and most of it is coordination, repetition, and information transfer, try the tools first. Spend a month setting things up properly before you commit to a salary.

You might find you don’t need the hire. Or you might find you need a different hire. Someone who can build and manage these systems rather than just absorb the tasks they currently produce. If that’s where you land, it’s worth knowing that the role can be filled through a government-funded apprenticeship programme, which changes the cost conversation significantly.

That’s a different conversation. But it starts here.

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