Sixty hours of paperwork is not a paperwork problem

I had a call booked this week to talk about selling through wholesalers and buying groups. Ten minutes in, that topic was gone, because the thing actually holding the company up was an approval from a government scheme. Without it their customers cannot claim a grant on the equipment, and the electrician who fits a unit can come back afterwards and ask for his money back. So no volume conversation is worth having until the approval exists. I asked him how long the application would take him. He said forty to sixty hours, in one and two hour blocks, spread over weeks. Then he said the line I have repeated to three people since. Sixty hours away from selling.

Where the hours actually go

The application is not one job. It is assessed across several layers of compliance, each one wanting a different document, and some of the evidence only exists in the manufacturer's own language. So it gets hand translated here, sent back to the factory to be corrected, and then it waits. In the middle of all that is a man who was hired to sell and has since absorbed the marketing, the recruiting, the admin and now this. Every time he picks the application back up, the first part of his block goes on working out where he left off.

That is the real cost and it never appears on anybody's list. The hours are visible. The restart tax on every one of those blocks is not, and neither is the selling that did not happen because his head was in a compliance document. Computers are good at context switching. Human beings are not.

What I would build, and what I would not

Not a system that submits the application. A mailbox for that one subject, worked by an assistant that reads each query, pulls the answer out of the documentation the company already holds and the published rules, writes the reply and does not send it. It pings his normal inbox to say there is something to look at. He reads it, flags the section he does not like, and it goes and researches that part again and rewrites it. He approves line by line, and nothing leaves the building without him.

The translation loop disappears in the same move, which is the part he had not expected. A model can read the original language document directly and answer in English. Nothing has to be translated by hand, posted back to the factory, corrected and returned. That loop was costing him weeks of waiting rather than hours of work, and waiting is the expensive kind.

The part that is not software

He also told me, unprompted, that the wholesaler side is not an automation job. He needs to get face to face with someone. I agreed with him, which I think surprised him slightly. Half of what sits on his plate should never be automated, because it is the half where a person in a room is the whole value. The other half is the half that does not need him present at all, and that is the half worth building for.

Sixty hours away from selling.

So when somebody tells me their admin is eating them, I have stopped asking how many hours it takes. I ask what they would be doing with those same hours instead, and whether the work keeps getting put down and picked back up. The answer to the second one tells you more than the hours ever will.