Front Office Staff and Admins Rule!

Front Office Staff and Admins Rule! - Lessons Learned, Episode 47

As I mentioned in earlier "Lessons Learned" episodes, I made the same mistake most technical people do: When I got busy to the point of overwhelm, I hired another technician.

The reason for this is simple. As technicians, we tend to view our businesses as delivery systems for our technical knowledge and skills. That's literally why we started the business. But eventually everyone who survives for a few years learns that the technical side is only one piece of the business. 

Other pieces of the business are built around the technical, and support the technical, but they are not technical in nature. These include:

• The sales function
• The marketing function
• Finance functions (accounting/bookkeeping, invoicing/billing, tracking money, payroll, paying taxes, etc.)
• The management or personnel functions (hiring, training, goal-setting, evaluations, mission-vision-values, etc.)
• Client management and relationship building
• and all the miscellaneous little stuff and paperwork involved in all these things.

No one - absolutely no one - is good at all these functions. But they all need to be addressed at some point. Each function needs some time and some attention. Some things are time-bound like paying taxes. Others need to be done all the time, such as marketing and client management.

As a business grows, each of these functions either grows in size or importance, and often both. By size I simply mean volume. A newsletter is important, but essentially scalable to any number of recipients. Invoicing increases with each client added.

At first, all these little things grow slowly. Ten invoices per month becomes fifty invoice per month and five hundred invoices per month. That growth requires more money management, more account balancing, more questioned bills, more client management, etc.

While the technical side of the business is fundamental to why the business exists, technical service delivery does not address any of these other functions. This seems obvious when you have twenty-five employees, but may not be obvious at all when you have five.

All that non-technical stuff just grows and grows. And, unfortunately, it is often neglected because the owner is too busy doing tech support. THAT's the moment when we make the mistake of hiring another tech. It seems "obvious" that someone else should take care of the tech support delivery while the boss is freed up to do all the business-related stuff.

What really happens, however is that 1) The boss probably dislikes most or all of these other functions, 2) These functions stay as lower priorities because the boss is constantly called on to deliver technical support, and 3) Things are only taken care of when they become critical.

Perhaps the best example of this is invoicing. Again and again, I talk to consultants who fail to send out invoices in a timely manner, and even fail to collect money for the work they're doing. One of the primary reasons any business exists is to make money. That involves getting paid for your services and putting that money in your bank account. And yet, this is one of the most common failures for small business owners.

If the owner is non-technical, they are far less likely to get sucked into technical service delivery. For example, if they come from an accounting or sales background, they should hire a technician immediately to deliver the services being sold. But most owners are what Michael Gerber calls technicians who have an "entrepreneurial fit" and start a business (See The E-Myth Revisited).

I was very technical but had come from a non-technical background, so I was lucky to realize pretty early that I needed someone to help with all the paperwork and minutia that I didn't like doing. I was even luckier to hire Jennifer as my first administrative assistant and make her the office manager. She worked for me for eight years and grew to be the manager of all administrative staff.

When my company had fifteen employees, that included one office manager and four administrative assistants. And here's the shift of mindset that helped us grow faster and provide excellent service at a lower price: I didn't just hand off a few of the non-technical chores. We gave the administrative staff lots of work around order processing, inventory, marketing, finances, and even a good deal of the so-called technical work.

I have said countless times over the twenty years that most IT companies should shift a number of tasks from the tech support staff and give them to administrative staff. This is more true every day. My favorite example is setting up O365 and other cloud service accounts and creating users and email accounts for new clients. That is a 100% administrative task. It should not be done by the business owner or a technician earning $75,000 per year!

One of our rules for success was: If it can be done by an admin, give the job to an admin! That rule flowed from me (owner) to the service manager and office manager.

And still, after all this time, I meet a lot of business owners who have three, four, or five million dollars in top-line revenue and they are still doing all these chores themselves. And all that stuff is lower priority than putting out client fires, so the owner takes care of the technical work ahead of all the other things that need to be done.

I'm not sure why there is so much resistance to hiring administrative staff. Everyone I've ever met with an admin or office manager says they couldn't get by without these people. And most say they should have made that their first hire.

I knew my business was on the right track when I dashed into the office on a Saturday because I had to mail off a package. When I got there, I realized that I didn't know where the packing tape was. Or how to print a UPS label, or pretty much anything I needed to mail the package. So I just took it to the UPS store instead.

I actually felt a little pride in that moment because it was very clear to me that I had handed some duties to the point that I didn't even know how my company took care of this simple task. I could have figured it out, of course. But that would have been a longer and more frustrating job than it needed to be.

Most companies delegate far less than they should - with almost everything. And even after fifteen or twenty years, most of them are still stifling their own growth and profit by not delegating to the front office and admin staff that can make everything just a little smoother.

All comments welcome.

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Episode 47

This Episode is part of the ongoing Lessons Learned series. For all the information, and an index of Lessons Learned episodes, go to the Lessons Learned Page. 

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