Don’t make the right person do the wrong job

01

Whether I can help you, and where I cannot

Short enough to check yourself, right here.

Most of the businesses this fits are independent service businesses with just some regulatory hurdles: clients served include those from real estate, property management, NDIS, trades, and small-office agencies. The industry matters less than the shape of the work.

02

I was hired to add renewal capacity. Renewals were still going out late after I arrived

I worked as a broker assistant for an insurance brokerage in Toowong, Brisbane, and my job included renewals, insurer portals, quote comparisons, documents, follow-ups and deadlines. Much of it was the repetitive work that kept a book of clients intact.

Renewals were usually late, and the reason was not capacity

In this industry, a client is meant to be notified with enough time to read a renewal and decide on it. Renewals there were regularly being finalised inside the last 14 days before expiry. I had been hired as a helping hand to expedite that exact process, but even after I arrived, renewals were being processed at the same speed per person. Adding another person was never going to improve the underlying process that caused the slowness and the chaos in the first place.

That is not an internal inconvenience. A client given a few days to consider a renewal is a client more likely to let it lapse, or to take a call from somebody else. Late renewals become cancellations, cancellations become churn, and churn arrives two quarters later looking like a marketing problem.

Part of the operation ran on multiple systems that hardly talked to each other: Outlook, WinBEAT, Sunrise, and a shared file store whose folders had been arranged differently depending on who had made them. Hours went on hunting for emails whose names were formatted inconsistently. Renewal calculations were done by hand in an Excel spreadsheet, after copy-pasting the figures out of legacy insurance software.

The other part of it ran on paper, including a bound book of hand-ruled tables with client names written in by hand. The rest ran on what individual people happened to remember, which made it reliable exactly as long as they were at their desk. None of that was anybody’s fault. It accumulated the way it does, because daily routines and deadlines mean nobody has the time to clean up operational mess.

Every answer on the table added load to the same process

Instead of fixing the underlying issue, the director considered band-aid fixes: another broker assistant, a Salesforce licence, and a cold-caller to generate leads and replace the clients who had gone. Every one of those seems like a reasonable thing to buy.

The software was the clearest case. You can buy the CRM, but if the work still moves on printed paper and in someone’s head, you have bought a digital layer over a paper workflow and kept that workflow. Salesforce was also too complicated for a smaller brokerage that needed something easy to use. It created more steps than it removed.

More leads had the same shape. A business that struggles to serve its existing clients does not improve when you add clients to it: the new work enters the same sequence, service slips further, and more clients leave. Before asking how to win more customers, it is worth asking whether the business can absorb the ones it would win.

Frustratingly, I was not in a position to change any of this. I was close enough to see the work up close, and when I asked why it was run this way the usual answer was that this is how it has always been done. It was not long before I realised I could provide more value by addressing workflow inefficiencies than by inheriting them. So I left my job to do that part.

You cannot automate everything, and you do not need to

Before I left, a colleague raised the obvious objection: you cannot automate everything. That is true, and it is not the question. You do not have to remove all of a job for the economics of that job to change. If a role is mostly repetitive coordination, moving information between systems, chasing, preparing standard documents, updating records, watching dates and triaging routine requests, and most of that comes out, what is left may no longer justify a whole additional person.

Say 10-20% of it genuinely needs judgement, a relationship, or somebody to carry responsibility for an exception. Fair enough. The question then becomes whether that remainder warrants a hire, or whether the existing team absorbs it once the same drag has been taken out of their own weeks. The human work does not disappear. It moves to the people whose judgement and relationships are the reason you are paying them.

Every response to it looks responsible

None of that was specific to insurance. It is what happens to any business whose process grew by accretion while the client list grew.

The same shape turns up wherever the work recurs and the client list is the asset. In real estate it is a contact list living in a spreadsheet, property images cropped by screenshot, copy drafted in a chat window and pasted into Gmail by hand, one contact at a time, a few thousand times over. In trades and field service it is job sheets, variations and invoices going out late because what is needed to raise them sits with whoever did the work. The vocabulary changes. The sequence, the retrieval by hand and the reliance on somebody remembering do not.

Even the way most people use AI creates more work than it removes. A model drafting a custom message does not replace the manual work of copy-pasting that copy, addressing the recipient, uploading the attachments and recording somewhere that it all went out. Multiply that by 2,500 recipients and you have a time sink that puts a hole in the week.

All of this falls under the radar because the existing solutions hide the inefficiency. A CRM or an admin hire works well on good foundations and poorly on bad ones. Solutions get looked at before problems, and that ordering is backwards.

However, businesses usually do not have the time or the energy to analyse their own workflows, because the day-to-day comes first. That is exactly where I come in. I free up capable people to spend more of the week on the work that directly generates revenue.

A job, at its core, is just a bundle of tasks. What becomes redundant is the task, not the person. A role with its repetitive half removed is the same person doing more of what you hired them for, which is the point of having hired them.

03

As the old saying goes: Time is Money.

Put a figure on the role before you judge anything else on this page

What follows is that saying with your own numbers in it. Three you already have, and every judgement below is easier to make against a figure than against an impression.

05

The scope answers three questions, and the third is what makes the build safe to commission

A breakdown of the role on its own would still leave the build to be worked out on the way. The same week of work settles three things: what the role should contain, what to build, and how to switch it on. That is what makes the second stage a defined piece of work rather than an open-ended one.

The scope is useful whichever way it lands. A role that should be filled as written still leaves with a better job description than it arrived with.

06

The risk sits with For The East in writing

For The East is taking on its first 3 clients at founder pricing. Every stage carries a written guarantee rather than a testimonial. These are the terms, not a summary of them.

07

A virtual assistant is the cheaper answer while the work is small, and the more expensive one once it is not

Two alternatives come up on nearly every call. A virtual assistant is often the right decision, and this page says so where it is. An IT provider is not an alternative at all, because the job is a different one. It is worth being exact about where each stops.

The cost nobody counts is the decision itself. Each time volume steps up, the same question returns: who to hire next, at what rate, who trains them, who checks their work. That is your own time, and it goes on staffing instead of on revenue. A system is specified once and changed deliberately after that. It does not resign, and extending it does not begin with a search.

Your IT provider is not the alternative here

They lay the foundations and supply the bricks. This is the work of putting the bricks together into something that runs. A good IT provider makes that easier rather than unnecessary, and the two rarely touch the same task.

08

What happens after you book