Most people have a rough sense that hiring admin support costs money, and a much vaguer sense that not hiring it costs money too. The second half of that rarely gets worked out properly. If you want a real answer to whether delegating is worth it, the cost of not delegating is the number to calculate first, before you even look at what any PA service charges. It takes about five minutes and most people have never done it.
Work out what an hour of your time is actually worth
This is the bit everyone skips, partly because it feels a bit indulgent and partly because the answer is sometimes uncomfortable.
If you bill by the day or the hour, the sum is straightforward. Take your day rate and divide it by the hours you can realistically bill in a working day, not the hours you’re in the office, because those aren’t the same thing for most consultants and partners. A £1,200 day rate divided by six billable hours comes out at £200 an hour, and that’s before you factor in the hours spent chasing invoices or prepping for meetings that never get billed at all.
If you’re salaried, divide your annual salary by your working hours for the year, which for most full-time roles lands somewhere between 1,650 and 1,850 depending on holiday allowance. A £90,000 salary works out at roughly £50 an hour on that basis. A clinic director or HR lead on £120,000 is closer to £65. None of this is precise to the penny and it doesn’t need to be, you just need a number you believe in enough to compare against something else.
What that number should tell you about your inbox
Once you’ve got your figure, the next question is how many hours a week you’re actually spending on diary management, inbox triage, formatting documents, chasing suppliers, the sort of admin that doesn’t need your specific expertise but still needs doing. Most senior professionals underestimate this badly. Ask around and five to eight hours a week isn’t unusual once you add it all up, and that’s often on top of the hours already lost to meetings that could have been prepped or scheduled by somebody else.
If your time is worth £75 an hour and you’re spending six hours a week on admin, that’s £450 a week of your own time going toward tasks that don’t require your judgement, your qualifications or your client relationships. Over a month that’s close to £1,950. It’s not money leaving your bank account, which is exactly why it’s so easy to ignore, but it behaves like money leaving your bank account.
The oddly consistent £25 an hour and the cost of not delegating
This is where it gets genuinely useful rather than just theoretical. Crystal Clara’s monthly PA packages are priced at £250 for up to 10 hours (Essentials), £500 for up to 20 hours (Enhanced), and £875 for up to 35 hours (Executive). Work out the hourly rate on each and you get roughly £25 an hour across all three, which wasn’t something we set out to engineer, it’s just what the numbers do once you divide them.
That consistency matters because it means the comparison doesn’t shift much depending on which package suits you. If your own time is worth meaningfully more than £25 an hour, which for most consultants, partners and business owners it will be, every hour you spend on admin instead of billable or client-facing work is arguably costing you money rather than saving it. The cost of not delegating comes down to a fairly simple gap on paper: £25 against whatever your own number came out to.
Why people still don’t do the maths
If the arithmetic is this simple, why doesn’t everyone just delegate the moment they work it out? Partly it’s habit, because doing your own admin feels like being in control even when it isn’t actually the best use of your afternoon. Partly it’s a strange kind of loss aversion, where paying a monthly invoice feels like a real cost and losing three hours to your own inbox on a Tuesday doesn’t feel like anything at all, even though one of those is genuinely more expensive.
There’s also a version of this where people assume delegating means explaining everything twice and it ending up quicker to just do it themselves, which is a fair worry if the person you’re handing things to needs constant supervision. It’s a much smaller worry once there’s a dedicated point of contact who already knows your diary, your preferences and your recurring tasks, which is the whole idea behind the Enhanced and Executive packages rather than a one-off ad hoc booking.
And there’s a simpler reason, which is that admin rarely arrives as one obvious block of work you could hand over in a single tidy decision. It turns up as twenty small things across a week, a diary clash here, a document that needs formatting there, an email that’s been sitting unanswered for four days because nothing about it was urgent enough to jump the queue. None of it looks expensive in isolation. Add it up over a month, though, and multiply by your hourly rate, and it stops looking like background noise.
A quick worked example makes this less abstract. Take a management consultant billing £180 an hour who reckons, once they’re honest with themselves, that seven or eight hours a week go on diary juggling, chasing suppliers and knocking documents into shape. That’s roughly thirty hours a month, worth something in the region of £5,400 at their own rate. An Executive package covering up to 35 of those hours costs £875. Even allowing for the fact that not every admin task can be handed over cleanly, and some things genuinely do need the consultant’s own input, the gap between those two figures is hard to argue with once it’s written down.
Somebody with lighter admin needs will land somewhere else on that scale, which is why the packages exist at three different sizes rather than one, and working out which size fits is a much better use of ten minutes than guessing.
Do the sums before you decide
Work out your hourly rate, be honest about how many hours a week disappear into admin, and multiply the two together. Compare that figure against what ten, twenty or thirty-five hours of dedicated PA support actually costs, and you’ll usually find the answer is less close than you assumed. Somebody billing £150 an hour who reclaims even five hours a month by handing diary and inbox management to an Essentials package is, on paper, roughly £625 better off before you factor in the reduced stress of an inbox that isn’t quietly falling apart in the background.
If you want to run your own numbers against a real person rather than a chatbot doing an impression of one, book a discovery call and we’ll talk through which package actually fits how you work, rather than which one sounds nicest on a pricing page.