A comprehensive Harvard Business School study that tracked 60,000 hours of CEO time found a troubling pattern: executives spend up to 55% of their unscheduled time just managing email.
For UK founders earning £150,000 per year, this administrative burden represents a lost productivity of around £84,000 per year.
The study, conducted by professors Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria, tracked 27 CEOs over a 13-week period, recording their activities at 15-minute intervals around the clock. The results challenge the prevailing assumption that busy founders are necessarily productive founders.
The hidden costs of hands-on management
When founders spend 20 hours a week on administrative tasks—calendar management, email sorting, travel booking, and invoice processing—they’re not just doing necessary work. They crowd out high-value strategic activities that only they can do.
The math becomes stark upon closer inspection. A founder earning £150,000 per year will cost their business around £72 per hour. Administrative work that could be completed by support staff for £25-35 per hour has an opportunity cost of £40-50 per hour. At over 1,040 hours per year, this difference amounts to £50,000 – without taking into account the strategic work that never happens.
But the real damage lies deeper. Investment decisions remain in limbo while the founder sorts through travel receipts. Promising partnerships never materialize because follow-up emails sit dormant in an overflowing inbox. Product innovations fall by the wayside when calendar chaos eats up strategic thinking time. When you take these missed opportunities into account, the figure of £84,000 becomes conservative.
Where the Wilhelminian era is actually heading
The Harvard study found that CEOs work an average of 62.5 hours per week, with 79% on weekend days and 70% on vacation days. Despite this busy schedule, they spend 60-72% of their time in meetings, many of which prove ineffective.
Tom Gentile, former CEO of Spirit AeroSystems, spent 137 hours in 13 weeks managing email – the time he later admitted could have been better spent on direct communication and strategic planning.
British founders report similar patterns. Calendar coordination takes 3-5 hours per week. Email management takes 6-10 hours. Meeting preparation, travel arrangements and basic follow-up require an additional 5-7 hours. Total work time is often more than 20 hours – an entire workweek lost to tasks that don’t require founder-level expertise.
The delegation gap
Research shows that CEOs who delegate effectively achieve 33% higher growth rates and generate 33% more revenue than those who don’t. Nevertheless, many founders resist the delegation, citing well-known concerns.
“It will be quicker if I do it myself” proves true exactly once. On the 50th occurrence of the same task, founders have invested 50 times the amount of explanation effort without achieving any long-term return.
“I can’t trust anyone with this yet” reflects a fundamental misunderstanding. You don’t have to wait for trust – it is built through clear processes and iterative delegation.
“Delegation is for larger companies” creates a paradox. Without learning to delegate early on, many companies will never grow large enough to need it.
The distinction between task performer and thought partner
Most attempts at delegation fail because founders hire task handlers when they need thought partners. A task completer waits for instructions: “Tell me exactly what you need and I will do it.” This creates a bottleneck as every micro-decision still requires the founder’s input.
A thought partner anticipates needs: “I noticed that you have three investor meetings next week. I have prepared briefing documents summarizing market feedback, competitor moves and financial forecasts. Should I also schedule follow-up meetings with the investment team?”
The difference is measurable. Task completers reduce workload by 20%. Thought partners multiply effectiveness three to five times because they manage results, not just complete tasks.
This distinction explains why generic virtual assistants trained for basic administration often fail to meet the needs of founders. Companies need support that understands the strategic context, not just task completion.
Specialized services like virtual assistant agency DonnaPro focus exclusively on training executive assistants to support CEOs and founders, ensuring they act as strategic partners rather than simple task executors. Their model addresses the specific challenges of start-up and scale-up environments where traditional business support structures do not fit.
The “build versus buy” decision.
Once founders recognize the need to delegate, they face a crucial decision: build internal support systems or use specialized providers.
Building in-house offers advantages – full control, potential cultural fit, targeted focus. But it requires significant investment. Full-time executive assistants in the UK market cost £40,000 to £60,000 per year plus office space, equipment, payroll tax and benefits. The hiring process typically takes 3-6 months. If the hire doesn’t work out, the company faces a single point of failure.
Specialized agencies for executive assistants present a different model. Part-time professional support typically costs £2,000 to £3,000 per month and there are no long-term contracts. Assistants can start in days instead of months. Integrated backup coverage eliminates single points of failure. Most importantly, assistants are pre-trained on the founder’s specific needs and not on general business administration.
For young founders and scale-up founders, economic considerations increasingly favor specialized providers. A full-time management assistant makes sense if companies regularly need more than 30 hours of support per week. Below this threshold, professional part-time support offers better value without long-term employment commitments.
Implementation without interruption
Successful delegation follows a predictable pattern. Founders who get the best results start by tracking their time for a week and categorizing activities based on whether they require their specific expertise. Most find that 40-60% of their time is dedicated to tasks that others could do.
High-frequency tasks with low expertise are assigned first. Calendar management, email triage and travel booking usually result in immediate success. As trust builds, more complex work follows: preparing meetings, research, customer communication, project coordination.
The goal is to move from reactive task assignment to proactive demand forecasting. This requires investing time upfront in knowledge transfer and system documentation – an investment most founders resist because it feels slower than simply doing the work themselves.
The transition usually takes 4-6 weeks. Initial progress feels slow as the assistant learns systems and preferences. But by week 8-10, most founders report having regained 15-20 hours a week for real strategic work.
Regional considerations
Adoption patterns vary across different regions of the UK. London and the South East are leading the way, with a higher percentage of companies using professional leadership support. Scotland is following suit, particularly in Edinburgh’s financial services sector and Glasgow’s tech community.
Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds are seeing increasing adoption among manufacturing and professional services businesses. The Midlands and North of England are increasingly recognizing that executive support is a competitive advantage rather than a luxury expense.
The end result
Filip Pesek, founder of DonnaPro, notes: “If you don’t have an assistant, you are an assistant.”
For UK founders who still manage their own calendars, book their own trips and spend evenings sorting through emails, the question of whether to delegate is not. It’s about whether they can afford not to.
Successfully scaling companies are not led by founders who do everything themselves. They’re led by founders who make sure everything gets done – which is fundamentally different from doing everything in person.
