Buying help is a different decision from hiring somebody

Two quite different ways of getting more done

When a one-person business runs out of hours, the imagined solution is usually a person: somebody to take on the parts you cannot reach. That is one option and it’s the larger one, since engaging somebody to work for you brings a set of obligations that depend on how the relationship is classified and is not a decision to take casually.

The other option is to buy a defined task from another business that already does it. A bookkeeper, somebody who handles correspondence, a specialist for the part of the job you dislike, a service that deals with a process end to end. The work leaves, nobody becomes your employee, and the arrangement can be ended when it stops being useful.

What to hand over first is not what you dislike most

The instinct is to offload the task you resent, which is frequently the wrong candidate. The right first thing to buy is whatever is easiest to specify, easiest to check, and least dependent on knowledge that exists only in your head.

Bookkeeping is the classic example: it is well defined, done to a standard, verifiable, and there is an entire trade of people who do it properly. Compare that with handing over client conversations, which requires judgement, context and a relationship, and which will produce more work than it removes for at least six months.

Which tasks actually suit being bought

The pattern is repetitive work with a clear output and an objective standard. Record-keeping, processing, scheduling, transcription, formatting, dealing with a supplier, chasing routine correspondence. Also genuinely specialist work — anything where an hour from somebody who does it constantly beats a day from somebody who does it twice a year.

Work that resists it is anything requiring your judgement, anything the client believes they are buying from you personally, and anything you can’t yet describe. That last category is larger than people admit, and it is the reason a great many delegation attempts fail: the task was never defined, so what came back was wrong, and the conclusion drawn was that nobody else can do it.

The fee is not the whole cost

Buying help costs the fee plus the specifying, the checking and the fixing. In the first month that total usually exceeds what doing it yourself would have cost, which is why so many arrangements are abandoned just before they start paying off.

The return arrives from repetition. A task explained once and then done forty times without further involvement is transformative; a task explained forty times is not. This is why the specifying matters so much, and why writing down how something is done — before handing it over — is most of the work of successfully handing it over.

Define it, then check it against something

A workable arrangement needs a description of the task, an agreed standard, a frequency, and some means of knowing whether it was done properly. In a business of one, the last of those is easily forgotten, and work bought and never checked has a way of drifting.

It also needs a limit. Open-ended arrangements billed by the hour, with no agreed scope, produce exactly the same problems in reverse that scope creep produces with clients. Agreeing what is included, and what a change costs, is as sensible when you are the buyer as when you are the seller.

When buying help stops being enough

Bought help has a ceiling. It handles defined tasks well and it does not handle judgement, availability or anything requiring somebody to hold the whole picture. A business that needs a second person who can decide things has reached a different question, and it’s one with obligations attached that vary by country and by how the relationship is structured.

Reaching that point is not a failure of delegation. It is a genuine transition, and it is worth taking to a qualified adviser before making the arrangement rather than after. What buying help does in the meantime is buy time — often a couple of years of it — and demonstrate whether the work you were planning to hire somebody for actually exists in the quantity you assumed.

That last point is the underrated one. A business that has spent a year buying a task from somebody else knows precisely how many hours of it there are, what it costs, and how it varies through the year. That is a far better basis for a hiring decision than an impression formed during a busy quarter, and it is information that only exists because the work was handed over rather than absorbed.