At around £10m revenue, something predictable happens in growing service businesses.
The work doesn’t just increase – it multiplies. More clients mean more handovers. More handovers mean more checking. More checking means more internal messages, more “can you just…”, more spreadsheets, more chasing, more noise.
Costs start rising faster than revenue. And somewhere in that pressure, hard lessons get learned about people – who your real A-players are, who they aren’t, and what it actually takes to keep them performing at their best.
Most leadership teams absorb those lessons and move on. Very few stop to ask themselves about the next step: even with the right people in place, are we letting them play their A-game?
Scaling Up gets you asking the right questions
If you’re working within Verne Harnish’s Scaling Up methodology, you’ll recognise these three questions:
- Do we have the right people?
- Are we doing the right things?
- Are we doing those things right?
Even if you don’t follow Harnish, they’re important questions to consider. Most leadership teams take question one seriously. They hire A-players, pay properly, and protect their culture.
It’s at question two that things tend to go awry. The moment an A-player starts managing things they shouldn’t be touching, you’ve effectively stopped them doing the very thing you hired them for.
What Harnish means by A-players (and why it matters)
A-players aren’t simply “the ones we like” or “the ones who never miss a deadline.” They’re the top tier for a specific role: people who consistently produce exceptional results and do it in a way that strengthens culture rather than quietly undermining it. They are people you would put in the top 10% of available talent for their role.
The reason A-players are so important to a business (and why getting the most out of them is mission-critical) is because they can outperform an average performer by between 3x and 10x. That’s a staggering statistic, but one that we can attest to – we’ve seen that difference demonstrated with almost every Partner we work with. And it means that the cost of misallocating an A-player goes far beyond wasting their salaried hours – it can damage your bottom line dramatically.
In our experience, the commercial damage tends to show up most clearly in the layer just behind revenue generation – the work between winning the job and delivering it – handovers, systems, comms, reporting, follow-ups.
So, the question isn’t simply “do we have A-players?” It’s “are our A-players spending their week doing A-player work?”
Two roles where we see the cost clearly
Sales leadership in estate agencies
The commercial reality in estate agency is simple: you live or die on service, speed, relationships and judgement.
A top branch or sales leader isn’t valuable because they can manage their inbox. They’re valuable because they win instructions, steer negotiations, advise on appraisals, influence vendors, build client relationships, and keep standards high when the market turns. That requires commercial sharpness, high emotional intelligence, and genuine market obsession.
And yet, in practice, these same people regularly spend significant parts of their week setting up listings and files, pushing emails back and forth, chasing paperwork, checking details that should already be right, and nudging internal teams who aren’t owning their work end-to-end.
If a branch leader is responsible for £1m+ in revenue, what’s the opportunity cost of even ten to fifteen hours a week absorbed by that execution layer? It’s not just lost time. It’s lost momentum and fewer of the high-quality commercial conversations that separate a good month from a great quarter.
What compounds this problem even further is the fact that these people are often genuinely poor at admin. It takes them longer, it fragments their thinking, and it makes the work feel heavier than it needs to. That’s how an A-player quietly becomes a B-player.
Product leadership in premium travel
In a premium travel business, your product leaders (people like itinerary designers, heads of product, and experience managers) are the commercial heart of the operation. Their value lies in instinct, creativity, and the kind of deep supplier and destination knowledge that justifies a premium price point.
These are the people crafting experiences that convert at high margin, anticipating what clients will want before the data confirms it, and forging supplier relationships that give your portfolio a genuine edge.
But before you know it, they’re buried in rate sheet updates and version control, quality-checking content uploads, copying data between systems, and cleaning information before anyone else can use it. The itinerary that should have taken an afternoon of creative thinking takes three days because of everything surrounding it.
You hired them for judgement and instinct. You’re using them for QA and data entry.
What good support actually looks like – and why “hiring a PA” misses the point
The instinct when you spot this problem is to hire someone to help with admin. However, the Partners we work with who find the best solutions see things through a different lens, and consider what outcomes they are trying to protect, and what execution layer is needed to protect them.
That answer still might be a person, but it needs to be someone loaded with the right processes, technology and context. That means building something that can serve multiple A-players across the business, not just assigning a PA to one of them.
In our experience, what commercially critical A-players really need in administrative support tends to look something like this:
- Clean dashboards and decision-ready intelligence, not raw data dumps
- Outputs that don’t bounce back for rework
- Full ownership of transactional execution, not “I did my bit”
- No chasing paperwork because the system makes it happen
- Context filtering so leaders only see what actually matters
- Momentum without micromanagement – trust built into the process
A-players think in outcomes, not tasks. Elite support protects their focus so they can stay in strategy, relationships and judgement calls, not spreadsheets, emails, and fact-checking.
A simple test: ask your A-players these five questions this week
Before your next leadership meeting, ask your revenue-generating A-players to track one week and answer:
- Time allocation: What percentage of your week is genuinely strategic or revenue-driving versus administrative execution?
- Output ownership: What tasks are you completing that someone else could own end-to-end with the right process, technology and context?
- Decision-ready intelligence: How much time do you spend chasing, cleaning or formatting information before it’s actually usable?
- Momentum killers: What three tasks break your flow, force context-switching, or create rework?
- Opportunity cost: If you reclaimed ten to fifteen hours a week, what commercial outcomes would you prioritise that aren’t getting attention right now?
Their answers will give you a starting point for thinking about how you can protect them better.
Don’t hire more A-players. Protect the ones you’ve got.
This is what often gets missed in Scaling Up conversations: hiring A-players is only half the job. The other half is building the environment where they can consistently operate at A-level, with an execution layer that keeps the business moving without dragging your best people into the operational mud.
That’s the lens we bring at Smartsourcing. Not “outsourcing admin,” but designing a support model built around outcomes, backed by process, technology and people who can genuinely own the work.
If your A-players are doing B-work, you’re paying A-prices for average growth.
