Your most expensive hours are being spent on formatting.
In a firm that bills for expertise, every hour a senior person spends on document assembly, scheduling or desk research is an hour sold at zero. The arithmetic is unusually stark — which makes the case unusually easy.
Count the hours before you price the solution.
Most firms have never measured how much senior time goes on unbillable production work. The exercise takes a fortnight and usually changes the conversation entirely.
- Log it for two weeks
Every hour of research, formatting, scheduling and administration, by person and by grade.
- Split recoverable from not
Which of it genuinely needs the person doing it, and which needs a brief and a standard.
- Price it at their charge-out rate
Not their salary. The relevant number is the revenue those hours could have carried.
- Compare that against a delivery team
Now the business case is real, and usually decided before anyone talks about rates.
Usually recoverable
- Desk and market research to a defined brief
- Document formatting, assembly and version control
- Proofing against a house style guide
- Diary and meeting coordination
- Client onboarding paperwork and information chasing
- Recurring reporting and data assembly
- CRM and matter-record maintenance
Usually not
- The analysis and judgement itself
- Client relationship conversations
- Anything requiring professional qualification
- Work where the thinking happens while doing it
If the thinking happens while you do it, keep it. If it is execution against a standard, it can move.
That single test resolves most arguments about what to delegate in a professional services firm — and it is a better guide than seniority, because plenty of junior work is judgement and plenty of senior work is not.
Consistent because the brief is written, not because the researcher is senior.
Research quality in most firms varies by who happened to have capacity. A documented brief and a source standard fix that more reliably than seniority does.
A defined brief
What question is being answered, for whom, to what depth, by when — agreed before work starts.
A source standard
Which sources count, which do not, how recency is judged and how everything is cited.
A completeness test
What must be covered for the piece to be considered finished, rather than "looks about right".
A consistent output format
Same structure every time, so the person reading it knows where to look.
A second pair of eyes
Sampled review against the brief before it reaches the person who commissioned it.
A feedback loop
Where output missed the brief, the brief template changes — not just the researcher.
The unglamorous half of every engagement.
Reports, proposals, packs and deliverables consume days of production time per engagement, and almost none of it needs the expertise of the person usually doing it.
- Assembly from component parts to an agreed structure.
- Formatting to house style, scored against your style guide.
- Version control that survives four people editing at once.
- Proofing — consistency, numbering, cross-references, figures.
- Final production and distribution to the agreed format.
What firms ask
If the answer you need is not here, ask us directly — you will get a specific answer rather than a brochure.
For research and document work, what matters is a precise brief and a defined source standard — both of which are our responsibility to establish during Design. For client-facing work, the answer depends on the relationship, and we would usually recommend keeping the client contact with you.
Confidentiality obligations apply to every named person on the account. Conflict and restricted-client lists are respected, access is scoped per engagement, and work stays inside your systems.
Yes — that is a documentation exercise, not a talent one. We build the style rules from your existing output, train against them and score adherence in quality reviews.
No. A virtual assistant is one person doing undefined tasks. This is a documented process with a turnaround target, an accuracy target, sampled quality review and a named team lead — which is what makes it survivable when that one person leaves.
Log two weeks of unbillable hours.
Then bring us the number. We will tell you which of it is genuinely recoverable and what a team to absorb it would look like — or that it is too small to be worth it.