When you’re drowning in work, the instinct is to hire. Sometimes that’s right. Sometimes you’re about to pay a salary to do something a five-line rule could handle for free. The trick is telling the two apart before you commit.
Three questions
- Does it need judgement? Real decisions, taste, or relationships point to a person.
- Is it the same every time? Identical, rule-based, predictable work points to automation.
- Does it change often? If the process shifts weekly, a human adapts cheaper than a system you’d constantly rebuild.
Most owners have a mix. The repetitive 70% can often be automated, which frees a person to do the 30% that genuinely needs a human. It’s rarely all-or-nothing.
Count the real cost
A hire is a salary plus onboarding, management, and the time it takes you to train them. An automation is build time up front and near-zero after. Neither is free, but they’re expensive in very different shapes, and matching the shape to the work is the whole game.
Automate the predictable. Hire for the judgement. Don’t pay a person to be a robot, or a robot to make decisions it can’t.How we think about it
When you’re genuinely unsure, run the smallest version of each. Automate one slice and see if it sticks. The answer usually reveals itself faster than a hiring process would.