AI Guides › Money & Business
What To Automate In A Small Business Before You Hire For It
By Nigel Guy · 2 min read
When a role starts to feel necessary, the usual response is to open a hire
for it — without first checking whether the actual bottleneck is a pile-up
of repetitive, low-judgement work that a tool could absorb, in whole or in
part, before a person needs to be added at all.
The rule: before creating a new role, separate the recurring low-judgement
tasks piling up from the judgement-heavy work that genuinely needs a person —
automate the first, hire only for what's left.
The mechanism: the Automate-or-Hire Grid
|
Low judgement required |
High judgement required |
| High frequency |
Automate first — data entry, routine replies, scheduling, basic reporting |
Likely needs a person, possibly supported by tools |
| Low frequency |
Neither — handle it ad hoc; not worth building for |
Needs an expert or consultant occasionally, not a full-time hire |
- List every task currently making the case for hiring.
- Plot each one on the grid honestly — the temptation is to call
everything high-judgement because it feels important, not because it
actually requires a person's discretion.
- Automate or tool up everything landing in the top-left cell before
finalising any hiring decision.
- Re-examine what's left. If it's now genuinely thin, it might be a
part-time or contract role rather than full-time.
- If the judgement-heavy work remaining is substantial, hire — and
don't try to automate around it. Genuine judgement work is exactly where
automation attempts tend to fail quietly.
What to skip
Skip automating something just because it's technically possible — for a
low-frequency task, building and maintaining the automation can cost more
time than doing it manually the few times a year it comes up. Skip using
this grid to justify never hiring at all; judgement-heavy work eventually
outgrows what tools and your own time can cover.
Guardrails
- Automation carries its own setup and maintenance cost — factor that in
rather than comparing it only against the labour hours it replaces.
- A role is also about capacity and resilience — what happens when you're
unavailable — not only about the task list. Don't let this grid make you
forget that dimension.
- Check current tool capability honestly for your specific tasks; some work
billed as automatable still needs heavy human supervision to stay
reliable.
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