Your admin person has just handed in their notice. After working with you for years, they're the one who knows the ins and outs of how your business runs. You’ve got two weeks until their final day. And you're left with a sinking feeling: even when you find a replacement, you don’t have the time to train them.
Finding a replacement almost always takes longer than you anticipate. Write and list the ad, sort through the applications, run a few rounds of interviews, make an offer, and then when someone accepts, you have to wait for them to work out their own notice period. This takes weeks at best, months at worst, and that’s all before anyone’s sitting at the desk. While you’re searching, the admin doesn’t stop. It moves to whoever has a spare ten minutes, which is usually you. Invoices go out late, the inbox fills up, and the quote you promised on Monday is still a draft on Thursday.
Eventually your new hire starts, and that’s when you have to take on the role of 'trainer'. Someone new needs to see how your systems work, where the files live, which customers get a same-day reply and which can wait until tomorrow. Every one of those questions lands on you, because the person who used to answer them has gone. For the first few weeks you’re running the business and running a training programme at the same time. That stretch of time is the most tiring part of the whole process, but it's important to get it right to set your new team member up for success.
The reason it’s so hard comes down to the fact that all those years of knowledge lives in one person’s head, and no two-week handover was ever going to get all of it out before they leave. So we start before they’re gone, not after. Hand us the job description while they’re still working their notice, and we pull from what already exists: their inbox, the shared folders, the quoting templates, the way invoices have been chased. You point us at those, your current admin person answers questions as they come up before their last day, and your Role Manager documents it properly as they go, so the knowledge ends up in your systems.
We’ve been doing this inside New Zealand businesses since 2012, so we know what an admin role in a trades, service, or consulting business tends to contain before we’ve opened the first folder. Behind your Role Manager there’s a full team and automation handling the repeatable work, though you’ll only ever deal with one person. By week two the role is running, and the questions that reach you are the ones that actually need your judgement. That means no job ad, and no interviews to fit around your busy schedule.
The whole role is covered for $958 a week, with no KiwiSaver, no leave to cover and no recruitment costs on top. That’s the equivalent of minimum wage, and it works because of everything above: a NZ-based team that’s spent over a decade in businesses like yours, automation taking on the repeatable work, and a global team behind your Role Manager for the volume.
If someone’s leaving and you can already feel the training burden heading your way, book a chat with Brenna. Walk her through what your admin person actually does in a normal week, and she’ll talk you through what taking over that role would look like. You don’t manage the onboarding. We do.
