The work I would not hand over to software

On a call last week an owner asked me the question underneath all the other questions. If you keep going, what is left for us? My answer has not changed in two years. Shaking hands. Physically moving something from one place to another. Having the conversation. Building the relationship. That is what we are for. Nearly everything else in your week is a candidate, and the reason is not that software is better at it. It is that most of it is not the job.

The test

Ask whether the task only exists because information is sitting in the wrong place.

Copying a figure out of an email into a spreadsheet. Chasing somebody for a signature. Reading sixty pages of a submission to find the one line that is missing. Typing an address that is already in three other systems. Working out which of your engineers is free on Thursday by messaging four of them. None of that is work. It is the tax you pay for the work, and it is charged in the only currency you cannot earn more of.

In energy and construction that tax is unusually high, because the information arrives as a PDF drawing, a photo of a meter cupboard, a scanned certificate and a voice note, and then somebody in an office spends their Tuesday turning all of it into one row in a system. Nobody chose that job. It grew.

What I keep on the human side

Four things, and I would argue for them in any business I work with.

• The site visit. Somebody has to stand in the room, look up at the roof, open the panel and see the thing that is not in any of the paperwork.
• The awkward call. When a customer is unhappy, the only acceptable response is a person who can take it.
• The decision you cannot yet defend with data. Pricing a job nobody has done before, deciding whether to walk away, judging whether a client is worth the trouble.
• The first conversation with somebody new. Not the booking, not the reminder, not the notes afterwards. The conversation.

The thing is, those four are also the parts of the week that owners tell me they never get to. They are busy. They are busy doing the tax.

Most people draw the line the wrong way round

What I see more often than anything else is a business trying to automate the relationship and keep the admin. They want the outreach written for them, the sales conversation scripted, the follow-up sent without them reading it. Then the same owner spends Friday afternoon reconciling payments by hand, because that part feels like control, and because nobody ever praised anyone for delegating paperwork.

It is backwards. The admin is where software is close to perfect and nobody notices it working. The relationship is where software is obvious, and being obvious there costs you the deal. From my point of view, if you only ever do one of the two, do the boring one. It is lower risk and it buys back time you can spend on the part that cannot be copied.

Automate the tax. Keep the job.