Hiring Your First Admin

The signs it's time

Nobody hires an admin because the paperwork is mildly annoying. They hire one when the office side has started costing money, and the symptoms are specific enough to name:

• Quotes go out days late, or don't go out at all. The enquiry that waited four days went to someone else.
• Invoices lag the job. You finished it a fortnight ago and it still hasn't been raised, so the money is sitting in your customer's account instead of yours.
• Nobody chases the overdue ones, because chasing money is the job everyone puts off last.
• The phone rings out while you're in a roof cavity, and half the callers don't leave a message.
• You're doing admin at night and on Sundays, and the admin is still behind.
• Compliance paperwork is reconstructed after the fact — certificates, safety documents, licence renewals you found out about because someone asked.

If three or four of those are true, the question isn't whether the business can afford an admin. It's whether it can afford another year without one.

What actually comes off your plate

"Admin" is vague, and vague roles are the ones that don't work out. Before you advertise, decide which of these you're genuinely handing over, because the answer changes who you should hire:

Some of that overlaps with what a bookkeeper already does for you, and some of it is work you should keep. Quoting price decisions, hiring, and anything where a client needs to hear from the person who'll do the work — those stay with you.

How the hire pays for itself

A tradie hire justifies itself with chargeable hours. An admin can't, so the maths runs a different way — and it's the reason plenty of owners talk themselves out of a hire that would have made them money.

1. Work out their full annual cost. Wage plus everything that sits on top of it. That number is worked through in our guide on what your first employee actually costs — the on-costs are the same whether the person is on the tools or in the office.
2. Count the hours they hand back to you. Be honest: not every hour they take is an hour you'd otherwise have billed. Count the hours you'd genuinely convert to chargeable work, and value them at your charge-out rate, not your wage.
3. Add the leaks they close. Enquiries that get answered same day, invoices raised on time instead of three weeks late, variations that make it onto the bill, debtors chased at 30 days rather than 90. These are usually bigger than the hours.
4. Take off what you lose in the run-in. For the first month or two you're training rather than working, and the admin is being done twice. Budget for it.

Full-time isn't the only shape

A one-ute business rarely has a full week of office work in it, and hiring for forty hours when you have fifteen creates its own problem. The realistic options:

• Part-time employee — the most common first step. Two or three fixed days beats scattered hours, because the work needs continuity.
• School-hours or split shifts — genuinely widens the pool of good people for a small business.
• A bookkeeper for the money side — many trade businesses already have one, and extending their scope is cheaper than a hire.
• An answering service — narrow, but it stops the phone ringing out while you decide.
• A family member — workable, but put it on the same footing as any other employee: hours, pay, and what the job actually is, in writing.

What to look for

Trade admin is not general office work. The person who's brilliant in a corporate back office can drown in a business where the phone, the schedule and an angry supplier all arrive at once. What actually predicts success:

• They can hold a phone conversation with a customer who's annoyed and get to a booking rather than an argument.
• They'll chase money without torching the relationship. This is a specific skill and most people don't have it.
• They're comfortable in software — not expert, but not frightened of learning a system properly.
• They chase detail without being asked. A missing purchase order or an expired ticket should bother them.
• They'll tell you when something's wrong. An admin who quietly absorbs a problem for three months is worse than no admin.

Trade experience helps but isn't the deciding factor — the trade knowledge is learnable, the temperament isn't. What you can't work around is someone who needs a defined process for everything, because for the first six months you won't have one.

The order to hand things over

The mistake is handing over everything in week one and getting it all back in week three. Go in order, and don't add the next thing until the last one runs without you:

1. The phone and the diary. Highest value, easiest to teach, and it buys back your day immediately. Give them the authority to book jobs inside rules you set.
2. Invoicing. Raising invoices from finished jobs is mechanical once your rates and job records are in one place. This is where the cash flow improvement shows up first.
3. Debtor follow-up. A written schedule — reminder at seven days, call at fourteen, escalation at thirty — so it happens without you deciding each time.
4. Supplier invoices and materials. Matching supplier bills to jobs catches the double-charges and the materials that never made it onto a quote.
5. Compliance and renewals. Licences, insurances, tickets and safety documents, with every expiry date in a diary that isn't your head.
6. Quote preparation. Last, because it needs the most judgement. They build it from your measurements and saved rates; you check the price and press send.

Frequently asked questions