On a call in last year, a business coach I know told me he'd reached the point where he needed to either automate a pile of his admin work or hire an assistant. I answered right away: "You can easily automate that and not hire someone." It sounded helpful but I hadn't asked a single question about what the assistant would actually do.
That's the mistake I'm supposed to help owners avoid. "Hire or automate" was the stated problem. Underneath it was a question nobody had answered yet: how much work is there, and what kind? A couple of hours a week copying contacts between two systems is one thing. A steady stream of scheduling, follow-ups and judgment calls is something else, and that might really be a job for a person.
He handed me the other half of the lesson later that month. Once he got into automating, he said, he started automating everything and stopped doing business development. I know that pull. Building the automation feels like progress, and it can quietly eat the time it was supposed to free up.
So now I start with a list. Which tasks would the assistant take on, how often does each one happen, and how long does it take? Which could we realistically remove? Then I fix the one that costs the most time, the simplest way that works. Sometimes that's an automation, and sometimes the honest answer is to hire the assistant. Either way, size it before you say "just automate it."