When should a business hire its first assistant?
Someone asked me that recently.
My answer? First hire. Always.
Here’s why.
A Harvard study found that the average entrepreneur works around 50 hours a week and spends 36% of that time on admin – invoicing, scheduling, follow-ups, and other tasks that could easily be handled by someone else.
That’s nearly two full days every week. Two days you’ll never get back.
Founders tell themselves they’re saving money.
They’re not.
They’re losing thousands.
Let’s do the math.
If your time is worth $100/hour and you’re spending 18 hours a week on admin, that’s $1,800/week in lost value.
Paying an assistant $40/hour for those same 18 hours would cost $720 – meaning you’ve just freed up $1,080 of your time to focus on strategy, sales, innovation, or projects.
Over a year, that’s $54,000 worth of higher-value activity reclaimed without you lifting a finger.
That’s a 2.5× gross return and about a 150% ROI on the assistant’s cost.
And that’s if it takes the assistant the same time as you to do the work.
Most assistants are experts in systems and processes, so the real savings are often far greater.
The best founders know their focus time is their most valuable asset.
Yet too many are trapped “in” the business instead of working “on” it – managing logistics and dealing with operations instead of building value and driving growth.
You can’t call yourself an entrepreneur and not see the basic business sense in this.
Hiring an assistant isn’t an expense.
It’s an investment that will immediately pay for itself.
And it’s the first scalable system your business will ever have.
