The evenings spent on invoices
The first office administrator in an owner-managed company usually arrives late. By the time the headcount is eight to fifteen people, the owner has been doing the invoicing, the MPF paperwork, the supplier payments, the office supplies, the leave records and the shared inbox — often after the rest of the staff have gone home. None of these tasks is difficult on its own. Together they are a second job that nobody has named.
The hire only works if the work actually moves, and if a few things stay where they are.
A two-week test, then write the role from that list
A simple way to know it is time: for two weeks, note every administrative task you do and the minutes it took. Include the ones that feel too small to count — ordering paper, chasing a supplier for a copy of an invoice, answering the general inbox at 10pm. If the total is more than a day a week, hire.
Write the role from that list, not from a template job description. Be honest that this is a generalist role. A first administrator in a twenty-person trading firm will book couriers, keep leave records, prepare payment batches and answer the main phone. Pretending it is a specialist post sets the wrong hire up to be disappointed, and the owner up to keep doing the bits that "are not really admin".
What to hand over in the first month
Hand work across in order, low-risk first.
Start with the quiet, internal work: office supplies, filing, scheduling, leave records, chasing documents that other people have forgotten to send. These have a clear "done", and a mistake is recoverable.
Then the customer-facing routine: the general inbox and the main phone, with a set of saved replies for the questions that come every week — opening hours, how to send a purchase order, where to deliver. The administrator answers from the saved set and passes anything that needs a price, a promise or a judgement to the person who owns that customer.
Then payment preparation, not payment approval. The administrator prepares supplier payment batches and staff expense claims, checks the paperwork is complete, and puts the pack in front of the owner to approve. Keep that line visible from the first week, including to the person you have just hired.
What the owner keeps, and the money-adjacent guardrails
For now, the owner still approves every payment, signs anything that binds the company, makes hiring and salary decisions, and holds the relationship with the bank and the accountant. Those are owner tasks. Handing them over in the first month, because the new person seems capable, is how a small company creates a control gap it will not see until something has already gone through.
When the work sits next to money, put the guardrails in before the login is issued.
Give the administrator a separate login in the banking and accounting systems, with view-or-prepare rights only. Do not share the owner's credentials "just for the first month". A shared login cannot be revoked cleanly, and it hides who did what.
Keep looking at the monthly reconciliation yourself. The administrator can prepare it. The owner still reads it.
The company chop stays in a locked drawer, with a simple usage log of the date, the document and who asked for it. The administrator may need it for a bank form or a delivery note; they should not be able to pick it up unrecorded. A first admin hire is not a reason to leave the chop on the desk.
The first two weeks
On day one, give them a written list of the twenty recurring tasks the role now owns, with how often each one happens and where the information lives — which folder, which inbox, which spreadsheet. If you cannot name twenty, the two-week test was not finished.
Introduce them, in the first fortnight, to the accountant, the bank relationship manager, and the two or three suppliers who already know the owner by name. A short email or WhatsApp that says who now prepares the paperwork, and that the owner still approves, lets those people work with the new person without calling you anyway.
Hold a ten-minute check-in every day for the first fortnight, then move to weekly. The daily slot is for questions that would otherwise wait until something has already gone wrong.
Hire the person the work needs, then stop doing it
The usual mistake is a mismatch of seniority and judgement. A junior hire is given the inbox, the payments pack and the leave records, and then quietly expected to decide which supplier to chase. Or a more senior hire is brought in and given filing and stationery, because the owner is not ready to let go of the evenings. The first case burns the person out. The second wastes the salary and leaves the owner's diary unchanged.
This hire buys back the owner's time only if the owner actually stops. At the end of the first month, write down the tasks that are no longer yours to do — not as a hope, as a rule you are no longer allowed to break. If the list is empty, the hire has not happened yet, whatever the contract says.