It’s Saturday afternoon and you’re sitting in your home office entering emails into your contact list after several days of networking at a conference. Monday night you get home only to dive right back into your email to address a scheduling conflict for Tuesday. It’s 11pm and you’re still assembling a board deck to present the next day. You didn’t become a founder to spend 45 minutes comparing flights. But here you are.
Most early-stage executives pay an invisible tax when it comes to operational and administrative duties. These tasks may never show up on a time audit but can add up to 8-12 hours a week or more to an already loaded schedule. With no one else to take on these lower-level but time-sensitive responsibilities, a CEO can get bogged down dealing with the nitty-gritty details, rather than focusing on the big picture.
Emailing back and forth with external partners to find time on the calendar for a few meetings can fill an entire day. A last minute in-person investor pitch needs preparation, but first you need to make the travel arrangements and comparing flights often takes longer than expected. Without taking the time to triage and clean-out a packed inbox, important messages can be easily missed. Board prep requires building a deck, but also arranging lunch catering that accommodates everyone’s dietary needs. Before you know it, half the week is gone, spent on tasks which could have been delegated to someone else.
The hours lost to operational work are the same hours that could be spent closing the next round. And the cost is paid in more than merely hours lost. The constant context-switching between CEO and Office Manager can leave you unfocused and less productive in the time you do have. Every operational interruption pulls you out of strategic thinking.
The executives who outperform aren’t necessarily smarter. They’ve structured support around themselves earlier. Strategic planning is just as important in your operational structure as it is in the board room. It’s easy to think that skipping out on administrative support at the start is a good money-saver, but this is short-term planning that only accounts for the bottom line. Long-term, the invisible tax on your time and productivity could cost your business far more.
So the next time you find yourself working late into the night to meet a deadline, or looking at an ever-growing to-do list, ask yourself if going without an executive assistant was really the right choice. What would you do with 10 more hours a week?