You have been meaning to hire someone. You have probably had the conversation with your FD, or your partner, at least twice. The first time was a genuine discussion. The second time was more of an acknowledgement — yes, the need is still there, still unresolved, still being absorbed by the team.
The need is real. There is work that is not getting done, or it is getting done badly, or it is getting done by someone who should be doing something else entirely. But the business case does not land. Thirty-five thousand pounds in salary. Eight thousand in employer National Insurance and pension. A laptop. A desk. Six months before they are productive. A management overhead you do not currently have the bandwidth for.
So the hire stays on the list.
The work that prompts a hiring conversation falls into two quite different categories. They are rarely distinguished. That distinction is where the business case breaks down.
The first category is judgement work. Relationships that require context. Decisions that depend on experience. Client-facing conversations where the outcome depends on reading the room. This work needs a person. There is no argument for a different approach.
The second category is pattern work. The management report that follows the same structure every week, pulling from the same three systems. The supplier chase that follows the same rules: two weeks overdue, first contact; four weeks overdue, escalate. The reconciliation that checks the same things in the same order every month. Work where, if you sat down and tried to explain the process to a competent new starter, you could do it in ten minutes on a whiteboard.
The hire you are trying to justify is actually two different problems. Judgement work needs a person. Pattern work does not. You are trying to solve both with one salary, and the economics do not work for either.
The person you hire will spend some fraction of their time on judgement work, where they add genuine value. They will spend the rest on pattern work — work that, had you solved it differently, would not require them at all. You are paying a full salary to address a partial need.
The business case looks weak because it is weak. Not because the need is not real, but because the proposed solution is the wrong shape.
The alternative is to separate the two problems. Automate the pattern work. The capacity this frees up in your existing team is, in many cases, the capacity you were trying to hire for.
The supplier chase that takes forty minutes a day can run hourly, without anyone touching it. The management report that takes a Monday morning to compile can be in inboxes at seven o’clock. The month-end reconciliation can be ninety percent complete before the last working day arrives.
Your best person — the one doing the reconciliation every month because nobody else knows how — does not need replacing. They need freeing. The work they were hired to do is waiting on the other side of the work that is currently consuming them.
A new hire at full loaded cost — salary, employer NI, pension, equipment, management overhead — runs to forty-five thousand pounds at the lower end. That figure does not include the six months of reduced effectiveness while they find their feet.
Managed automation handling the same pattern work costs a fraction of that, and it is operational in weeks. No sick days. No handover risk when someone leaves. The work runs to the same standard every time, because the standard is defined in the process, not in whoever is executing it on a given Tuesday.
What changes over time is this. Month one, the system handles the straightforward cases. Month six, it handles edge cases your team forgot existed. Month twelve, it is more thorough than any person doing the same task — because it has absorbed every variation it has ever seen. The knowledge stays in the business.
The hire you cannot quite justify is telling you something. Not that the need is not real — it is. But the shape of the solution is wrong. You do not need another person carrying pattern work. You need the pattern work handled, reliably, and your people freed to do what they are actually capable of.
There is a version of your business where the work that is not getting done gets done. Where the person being consumed by reconciliations is doing the work they were hired for. Where the hire you have been deferring for six months turns out to be something you did not need to make after all.
That version starts with understanding what your team actually spends its time on.
If this describes your situation, the first step is one question. Start here.