Most trades businesses don’t plan to end up doing admin at 9pm — it just happens gradually, one missed call and one late invoice at a time, until it’s normal. Here’s how to tell whether it’s time to hand some of it off, and what your actual options are.
The signs it’s time
- Calls are going to voicemail during the day because you’re on a job, and you’re calling people back after hours instead of during them.
- Quotes take days to go out because there’s never a clean 20 minutes to write one.
- Your calendar lives in your head, a notebook, and three different group chats — and it still double-books occasionally.
- You’ve stopped chasing some invoices because chasing them takes longer than you feel like they’re worth.
- You’ve quietly said no to a job you could have taken, because there wasn’t time to deal with the enquiry properly.
If more than one of these sounds familiar, the problem usually isn’t that you’re bad at admin — it’s that there’s genuinely not enough time in the day to do the job and run the office behind it.
What your options actually are
Hire in-house. Gives you someone dedicated and in the room, but it’s the most expensive option, and a part-time admin role can be hard to fill well — you’re asking one person to be good at phones, scheduling, and bookkeeping all at once.
Hire a freelance virtual assistant. More flexible and usually cheaper than in-house, but quality and reliability vary a lot, and you’re managing that relationship yourself — training them on your process, covering when they’re unavailable.
Use a specialist trades back-office service. Built specifically around the way trades businesses actually work — call answering, job booking, quotes, and invoicing bundled together, run by people who already understand the workflow instead of learning it from scratch. This is the gap Sortivo is built to fill.
Work out what’s actually costing you time first
Before you hire anything, it’s worth a week of honestly tracking where the hours go: how many calls you’re missing, how long quotes sit unsent, how much of your evening goes to invoicing. That’s the thing you’re actually trying to fix — not “get some help” in the abstract, but close a specific, measurable gap.
Once you know that, see what Sortivo actually covers and decide whether it’s the right shape of help for what’s slowing you down.