It's Thursday evening and you're scrolling through your inbox when you spot it: an enquiry from Monday morning. Someone found you online, filled in the form, and asked whether you've got room for a new client. You read it on your phone between a call and a question from your team, thought "I'll give that a proper reply when I've got ten minutes," and then the week happened.
Now it's been four days. You're drafting an apology for the slow reply before you've even started on the answer, and you're wondering whether the person on the other end has already found someone else.
Why the enquiries are the first thing to slip
Most admin can wait without anyone noticing. An enquiry is different, because a good reply takes more thought than ticking something off a list. You need to check whether you've got capacity, decide how much to say about timing and price, and sound like the business you've spent years building rather than something rushed between meetings. So it gets saved for when you have proper time, and when you're running the business and doing your own admin as well, proper time rarely turns up.
The trouble is that nobody on the other end knows any of that. All they can see is that they asked a question and nothing came back, and that looks exactly like a business that isn't interested. People who are ready to ask are usually equally ready to move on to the next name on their list.
It's rarely just the enquiries
The Monday email tends to have company: the website form that came through on the weekend, an existing client asking about a new piece of work, a past enquiry you meant to follow up on. And behind those sits the rest of the admin that's landed on you since the business outgrew you doing everything yourself. The invoices went out later than they should have last month, there are debtors you haven't chased, your calendar only makes sense to you, and the job ad for the admin role you've been meaning to fill since siz months ago is still on your to-do list. Every one of them is waiting on the same ten minutes you haven't found.
Enquiries are simply the part people outside the business can see. What a slow reply is really telling you is that there's a whole role in your business with nobody in it, so it's being done by you, in the gaps, whenever you can.
Handing over the whole role
That's the gap we fill. Strictly Savvy is an NZ-based team that takes over business support roles. You hand us the job description for the role you need covered, whether that's admin, accounts, executive support, or a mix of all three, and we take over the entire role. There's no job ad to write, no interviews to fit around client work, and no weeks spent training someone new while you're still doing the job yourself.
You get one dedicated Role Manager who learns your business and owns the role. Behind them is our NZ-based team of 13 Role Managers, VAs, bookkeepers, and creatives, along with smart automation that handles the repeatable work and a global support team for volume and specialist tasks. You don't need to think about that mix. You deal with one person, and the work gets done.
Your invoices go out on time, your debtors get followed up before it becomes awkward, your calendar makes sense to more people than just you, and your inbox has someone properly watching it.
That entire role is covered under one fixed weekly rate of $958, with no KiwiSaver, no leave to cover, no recruitment costs, and no long-term contract. If that sounds too good to be true, run the numbers on a full-time hire first. Once you've added KiwiSaver, leave, ACC, and the weeks it takes to recruit and train, the real cost sits well above the salary on the ad. Pairing an experienced NZ-based Role Manager with automation and our global team means you pay for output, not hours on a chair, which is how we can manage a full-time role for the equivalent of minimum wage.
Where your enquiries fit in
Because new enquiries are part of the admin role, your Role Manager learns how you handle them: the questions you ask first, what you say about timing and price, which kinds of work are a great fit and which you'd rather point elsewhere. A proper reply goes out to the person who asked, a time is held in your calendar if a call is the next step, and the ones that need you reach you with the background already attached, so you walk into the conversation knowing what was asked and what's been said. It's the same approach your Role Manager takes with the rest of the role, learning how you'd do it and then doing it that way.
"But those replies are the one thing I don't want to hand over"
It makes sense for an owner who has built the business on how it treats people, because a first reply sets the tone for everything that follows. It's also the reason it matters who is writing it. A generic template from someone who doesn't know your business can do more harm than a slow reply, which is why the early stretch is spent learning how you'd actually answer.
You stay in the conversations that need you, and the ones that don't stop depending on whether you found ten minutes that day. We've been working inside NZ businesses since 2012, across admin, accounts, and EA work, so being the first voice a new enquiry hears on behalf of a business isn't new ground for us.
If new enquiries are the thing slipping in your week, there's a good chance they're not the only thing. Book a chat with us, tell us about the role you've been covering yourself, enquiries and all, and ask how handing it over would work in your business.
