Admin · Ops · Sales support · Back office · Remote, Australia-wide
Invoices, follow-ups, scheduling, the whole back end. You were going to hire someone for that. Hand it to me instead.
You say what it covers and what done looks like. I own it from there, and I build the systems underneath it, so the job shrinks instead of growing.
Do it right and the next person you hire walks into a role that already runs.
Tom Topfer
The problem
Hire and you move the pile, you don't shrink it.
Three months training someone, and a year later there's the same amount of work. Just somebody else holding it, and when they leave, most of what they worked out walks out too.
How it works
Before I start, you tell me what the role covers and what "done" looks like for each part of it. We write it down. Then it's mine.
Examples
Every business hands over a different half of this list. What matters is the right-hand column: the standard, not the task.
| The task | What "done" looks like |
|---|---|
| Invoicing | Invoices go out the day the work is finished. Nothing sits unpaid past 30 days without being chased, politely and repeatedly. |
| Quotes and proposals | Out within 24 hours. Followed up on day 3, day 7 and day 14. You never wonder which ones went quiet. |
| Inbox and phone | Every enquiry answered the same day. Nothing goes cold because everyone was out on a job. |
| Scheduling and diary | The week is booked, customers know when you're coming, and changes get communicated before they become complaints. |
| Suppliers and orders | Ordered on time, bills entered and matched against jobs, no surprises at month end. |
| Customer list and reviews | Actually up to date. A review asked for after every completed job. Nobody forgotten. |
| Outreach and pipeline | An agreed number of new conversations started every week, logged, followed up and reported back to you. |
| Onboarding new customers | Same paperwork, same welcome, same standard, every single time. |
The difference
An employee's workload only ever grows. This one is built to shrink, because I'm automating my own job while I do it.
The handover
I'm not building a dependency. Every system I put in is one you own, in tools you already pay for. Every process gets written down as we go. Plain English, screenshots, the lot.
So when the job is small, you've got three options and all of them are fine.
A day a month to keep it healthy and keep improving it.
The written procedures mean a junior can hold it, for a fraction of the salary.
It's your systems and your documentation. Take it and go.
If I've done this properly, the role you were about to fill doesn't exist any more.
Why me
Because it's the part I actually like. I've spent fifteen years around small and mid-sized businesses. Healthcare, construction, agriculture, finance. Running them, analysing them, fixing them. The interesting part was never the strategy deck. It was the weeds: working out why the invoicing takes four hours, what's really going on in the pipeline, and then building the thing that fixes it.
Small business is a genuinely good place to work. Decisions get made in a day, and you can see what your work actually did. I like being in that, next to the person who owns the place.
The other half of it is that I'm deep in AI and automation tools, and small business is where they create the most value. A big company needs a project, a budget and a committee. You need one person who knows the tools and knows your business well enough to point them at the right thing. Finding that leverage is the work I enjoy most. It's what I'm passionate about.
Proof
Examples of prior engagements.
"Tom automated the part of our month everyone dreaded. Thousands of SKUs reviewed and reordered without the manual keying. Around 350 hours a year back, and the data entry nobody enjoyed is simply gone."
Tim · Sheldon & Hammond"Our estimator used to spend half his life copying quantities out of the design software and retyping them. Now the quote builds itself. Reckon it's saved him 500-odd hours a year, and he's a lot happier for it."
Ed · Lone Pine Landscapes"Finding and sizing up acquisitions was eating my week. Tom automated the whole top of the funnel. New listings daily, scored against our criteria. It's like having an analyst working overnight."
Nick · Ruma ProjectsWhat it costs
Market rate for the role. Whatever you'd have paid a good candidate for that job, that's the number. This isn't a consultant's day rate dressed up as a hire.
I work as a contractor, so none of the usual extras sit on top of it:
And unlike a salary, this number is built to go down as the job gets smaller.
Straight answers
A VA does the tasks you assign, and you check them. I own the tasks and the outcomes. And because I'm building the systems and workflows while I'm actually doing the work, the job gets smaller every month instead of costing you the same thing forever. A VA has no reason to make their own job smaller.
Everything lives in your systems and your documents, not mine. That's deliberate. It's the whole point.
No. You keep using the tools you use now, and the systems sit behind them. Part of the job is the opposite of a nightmare: showing you and your team what's actually available out there and what it could do in a business like yours, in plain English, so you can make your own calls on it later.
Then we say so and we stop. You're not locked into a long contract and there's no exit invoice.
Your systems, your logins, your data. Nothing gets moved somewhere I control.
Trades, professional services, agencies, distribution, property. Tell me about yours and I'll say honestly whether it's a fit.
A short call, no pitch. Tell me what the role was going to do and I'll tell you honestly whether this is a better deal for you than hiring.