I'll do you one better than hiring a receptionist... hire tech instead

Have you noticed service-based businesses grow until a point where they begin to stagnate? I have, in fact I work with a lot of them when they reach this point.

And I’ll give you a hint - hiring an admin person or receptionist is not always the answer!

I understand why that feels right. I’ve had that thought myself in past businesses. When work is coming through growing your team feels like the right way to ease the pressure - by all means it’s the normal way businesses operate.

But more often than not, it’s treating the pressure, not the cause. And it works! But there is an opportunity you may be missing to build sustainable scalability instead of just plugging a hole.

The value of the service-based businesses usually sits in the people delivering the work. Their judgement, experience and reputation are the product. Clients don’t come because of a flashy website or a clever funnel. They come because they trust you.

That’s a good problem to have, but it creates a quiet trap.

As demand grows, the business asks more and more from the same people. More meetings. More emails. More follow-ups. More context switching between client work and admin. Eventually, the very thing that makes the business valuable becomes the thing that caps it.

This is usually the point where someone says, “We need to hire a receptionist,” or “I think it’s time for a PA.”

What I see in most service-based businesses is that the service delivery is strong (that’s what’s got you this far), but the systems around haven’t been developed for growth. When the opportunity for growth comes there’s a critical point where business owners have to move from holding everything themselves to bringing in people, systems and processes to carry the weight so they can grow - without that shift the business owner/leader becomes a bottleneck and growth is stunted.

This can look like enquiries arriving through different channels, client communication lives in multiple inboxes (including your phone messages app), follow-ups depend on memory, and no one has a clear view of what’s happening unless they personally touch every step.

So the business owners become the safety net. They hold context. They catch mistakes. They fill gaps late at night or between meetings. The business works because they care, not because it’s efficient to work that way.

I worked with a firm recently where this was exactly the case. Their reputation was solid, referrals were consistent, and clients genuinely valued their work. But behind the scenes, everything felt heavier than it should have. Nothing was technically “broken” – yet everything required attention. The business leader was being pulled in every direction, leaving little capacity to focus on where they actually wanted to take the business. Mostly, growth.

When we talked about hiring, the frustration wasn’t really about answering phones or managing emails. It was the constant mental load of keeping everything moving while still delivering a high-quality service. They wanted the same level of consistency and thoroughness they were known for – but they simply didn’t have the capacity to maintain that many touch points with clients anymore.

As they tried to keep up with enquiries, the service started to lose its edge. Not dramatically. Quietly. A missed email here. A late follow-up there. Small gaps that slowly created tension in client relationships – and took far more energy to repair than they ever saved.

This is the point where I tend to step back and look at the business differently. When you spend your time building systems, you start to see patterns most people can’t – where pressure builds, where context gets lost, and where good work quietly breaks down.

Instead of adding another person into that environment, we stepped back and looked at the flow of the business as a whole. How enquiries came in. How clients were onboarded. Where communication stalled. What relied on someone remembering to do the right thing at the right time.

Once we could see that clearly, the solution wasn’t complicated. It wasn’t about working harder or tightening the reins. It was about removing the reliance on memory and goodwill, and replacing it with structure that reflected their ‘perfect day’.

From there, once I understood how the business actually worked, I could start programming that into the system. We connected enquiry points, created consistent follow-up, centralised client information, and made the routine parts of the business predictable.

What changed wasn’t the quality of the service. That was already there. We simply expanded the capacity of that quality by automating what was already working. The result was focus. The leaders could put their energy back into growth and step in where their judgement really mattered, instead of being dragged into everything.

This is an important distinction in professional services. You don’t scale by asking your best people to work harder or be more organised. You scale by protecting their time and focus so they can do the work clients actually pay for.

I’ve always believed that businesses should get easier to run as they mature, not harder. Growth for the sake of growth has never interested me. What matters is building something sustainable – where good people can do good work without burning themselves out.

That’s why I see systems as a form of respect. Respect for the people doing the work, and respect for the clients relying on them.

A receptionist can help manage volume. A system gives you visibility, consistency and control. It allows the business to function without constantly pulling senior people out of the work that creates the most value.

I’ll admit I’m a bit of a problem solver and if there’s a more efficient way to get something done - I’ll find it… or make it. Having felt this all in my old job I built revenu so no one had to hold all the context in their head anymore. It’s an end-to-end sales system that captures and automates every client touch-point across platforms and channels (yes, even Instagram DMs and text messages). It goes deeper than that technically but I won’t bore you with the details.

If you’re at a point where everything works, but everything feels heavy, it’s probably not a people problem. It’s a signal that the business has outgrown the way it’s currently being held.

If you want to talk that through, I’m always open to a conversation. Sometimes the biggest shift comes from building the system, not expanding the team.