Dumping Your Secretary Made Easy

Peer out of your office door, what’s your secretary doing right now? If you notice your secretary in the middle of a surreptitious nap, perhaps checking her Facebook account to see how her Farmville farm is doing, chatting with some dude online or on her cell phone or reading a magazine, then your money might be going down the drain, good buddy. Remember that a secretary is somebody who has a job to do, and in an ideal situation, she would be paid only for the work accomplished, and not those idle hours spent wasting company resources. A small business can circumvent such a situation by hiring a secretary only on a part-time basis to manage office affairs, while having an answering service take care of incoming calls.

Let’s take a closer look by doing some simple mathematics (at least in my point of view – otherwise you may need a calculator) and working with six variables from one to six.

Variable One – Secretary is paid $12.00 per hour each working day.
Variable B – Secretary works, or should we say mostly looks busy eight hours a day.
Variable C. Secretary spends 40% of work day managing office work.
Variable D – Secretary spends 30% of the day at work handling inbound phone calls.
Variable E – Secretary spends 12% of the day at work on her hour lunch.
Variable Six – Secretary spends 18% of the work day “looking busy” and wasting your resources.

In summation, your secretary is earning $96.00 on a daily basis. Breaking things down pursuant to the six variables mentioned above, they are earning $38.40 per day for actual office duties, $28.80 per day for answering the phone, $12.00 for eating lunch (that is, if lunch is paid) and $17.28 for having fun at the expense of your valuable bandwidth and office space. Now let’s expound on the above theory and multiply the numbers above by 22 business days, or one working month — secretaries earn $844.80 a month for office liaisons and other issues, $633.60 for handling inbound telephone calls, $264 for eating lunch and the remaining $380.16 for goofing off.

With all that in mind, your secretaries, dear business owners, are only spending 3.2 hours a day managing business in the office, which is not exactly cost-efficient relative to outsourcing duties to a call center or some other third-party organization. But it only gets more “fun” when you take into account “free time”, which encompasses quick breaks to take a wizz, smoke a cigarette, drink a cup of Joe, etc. — in that case, round up the 3.2 hours to four hours, and adjust your monetary figures to $48.00 daily or $1,056 monthly. In addition, take $250.00 as the average monthly fee for utilizing an answering service — hoping you still can keep up with this Math genius! Lastly, remember that if you are hiring a part-time employee, they are working four hours a day, thus are not required to be paid for lunch.

Alrighty then, it’s time for me to reveal those vaunted grand totals to all you business owners reading this from wherever you are.

First Situation. If you hire a secretary on a full-time basis for every facet of office work, you spend $2,112 a month.

Second Situation. Utilizing a secretary part time while outsourcing phone management duties to an answering service costs a business owner $1306.00 per month.

See what utilizing an answering service can save you — a good $9,792 annually and $816.00 per month — as opposed to hiring a full-time secretary. Keep in mind that this figure does not include the increase in business by having an after hours, 24/7 live operator presence managing your calls. A live operator will strengthen customer relationships and project the image of a larger, more secure & dependable business to your customers (& potential customers).

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