Free Guide
Seven signs, plus a calculator that tells you what one recurring process actually costs you in hours, full-time roles, and dollars a year. Here is how to spot it, and the arithmetic to run yourself.
The Math
A full-time role runs about 2,080 hours a year, which works out to 40 hours a week. That number does not care how the hours are distributed. Eight hours a day from one person and ninety minutes a day from five people cost you the same thing. Once a recurring workflow crosses 40 hours a week across everyone who touches it, you are funding a full-time position that produces no new work.
Most operators never run that number, because the hours are spread thin enough to look like ordinary overhead.
The Signs
Someone reads a value out of one system and types it into another. Re-keying is where errors enter, and the errors cost more to find than the typing cost to do.
When work gets scheduled, it has stopped being a task and become a job. Look for the recurring block that nobody questions anymore.
There is a name attached to the process. When that person takes a week off, the work either stops or somebody spends a day relearning it from scratch.
Off-the-shelf tools handle about 80% of how you work. The last 20% is where your margin lives, and it is the part no vendor is going to build for you.
Nobody is alarmed by the mistakes anymore. There is a rework step, a double-check, or a person whose job partly consists of catching what the process gets wrong.
Every time order volume goes up, you add a person. If your growth plan reads like a hiring plan, there is no leverage anywhere in the process.
Quotes for this kind of work run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, on timelines measured in quarters. That number is honest for the way most firms build. It is worth knowing that a smaller and faster path exists, because I have been on both sides of that quote.
Run Your Own Number
Pick one recurring process and answer three questions. The numbers update as you type, and nothing is sent anywhere.
For reference: the system I built at Gem Awards, the company where I work, gives the team back roughly 240 hours a month. That is about 55 hours a week, or 1.3 full-time roles. When someone left, the role was never backfilled.
Bring the process. I will tell you honestly whether it is worth automating, and what it would take. If the answer is that you should not build it, I will say that too.
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