Owners spend 11 hours a week on admin

Small business owners spend eleven hours a week on admin and finance jobs. That makes you the most expensive admin assistant your business has ever had.

The figure comes from the American Express SME Barometer, a survey of a thousand UK owners published this summer. Eleven hours is about six working days a month, nearly twice the time those owners spend on sales and growing the business.

Most owners have never put a price on those hours. Without one, every admin job looks small, and nothing feels worth handing to AI.

So work out what an hour of your time is worth. Take what you want the business to pay you in a year and divide it by the hours you want to work. A hundred and fifty thousand euro over fifteen hundred hours is a hundred euro an hour.

Now look at your week with that number in your head. Chasing a late payment, typing up meeting notes, sorting your inbox and writing the same email for the tenth time are all jobs AI can draft or sort for you today.

A job that eats three hours of your week costs three hundred euro at that rate. Over forty-eight working weeks, that's more than fourteen thousand euro a year, for one job.

Once you see that figure, handing it to AI stops feeling like a nice-to-have.

Pick the admin job that eats most of your week. Put your hourly rate on it, multiply by your working weeks, and hand the first draft of it to AI this week.