A small business should automate the work it repeats most often with the fewest decisions inside it. Not the job that irritates you. Those are rarely the same piece of work, and picking the second one has become an expensive habit. Outstaffer builds in this category, including an AI recruiter that runs the screening round, so read the rest with that declared.
NAB published its Monthly Business Survey for September on 13 October. Business confidence sits at minus 13 index points, a third consecutive fall and 22 points below where it was a year ago. Conditions are flat at minus 1. The employment index fell three points to its lowest reading in five years.
Firms have stopped hiring. They have not stopped buying tools.
Labour costs are compounding faster than anything you can charge
The survey puts labour cost growth at 1.7 per cent for the quarter and purchase costs at 2.4 per cent. Final product prices grew 0.8 per cent.
Compound those four times, which is my arithmetic and not NAB's, and over a year your people cost about 7.0 per cent more, what you buy costs about 9.9 per cent more, and what you can charge rises about 3.2 per cent. Inputs are rising at two to three times the rate of outputs. That gap is the whole reason the automation question is being asked in October rather than next June.
Put a number on it. Thirty people at $80,000 is a $2.4 million payroll, and 7.0 per cent of that is $168,000 of new cost next year for exactly the same output. Outstaffer publishes Employer of Record cover at $250 a month per employee, which is $3,000 a year on top of salary. The increase alone is fifty-six of those.
What a small business should automate first is volume, not irritation
Most owners rank candidate processes by annoyance. The invoice chase everybody hates. The report nobody reads. They feel enormous because they are loud, and they are frequently tiny.
How do you rank a process honestly?
Two columns. Hours a month, and decisions per hour. Count the first from a fortnight of diary entries, not memory, because memory inflates the irritating work and hides the quiet work. Count the second by asking how often someone has to exercise judgement that would differ between two competent people.
High hours and low decisions is where the automation money is. Order admin, data entry, first-pass screening, scheduling, reconciliation. Low hours and high decisions is where it is not, no matter how much the job grates.
The work you should not automate is the work that needs a person
Judgement work does not get cheaper when you buy software for it. It gets worse, and then it gets expensive again when somebody has to unpick the result.
What about judgement work you cannot simply drop?
That is a staffing question wearing an automation costume. The hour still has to be worked by a person, so the only lever left is what the hour costs and where it sits in your week. A capable offshore hire changes the cost of that hour without pretending the judgement went away. It also changes the timing, which matters more than owners expect once you have seen when the money leaves relative to when it arrives.
The honest counter is that this ordering is harder than it sounds. Volume is measurable and decisions per hour is a judgement call in itself, so two sensible people will rank the same five processes differently. That is fine. They will still both put the invoice chase below the screening round, which is the ranking that actually matters.
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Where this leaves you on Monday
Australian firms have been buying AI for a year now, and the accounting on where that money actually went is not flattering. Most of it landed on work that was already cheap.
So before you automate anything, spend one afternoon counting hours and decisions. Then automate the top of the volume column, staff the top of the judgement column, and leave the middle alone. If the screening round is what your count turns up, sign up and run one role through ours and compare the result against your own afternoon.
Which process would your count actually put first, and would you look at the diary before answering?
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