Most owners want out of the back office. Few know what that actually looks like. This is a week-by-week plan.
The premise: you're the owner or ops lead of a 5-50 person business. You're spending 10-20 hours a week on admin that shouldn't land on you. You've tried hiring; it helps for a while then you're back in the middle. You want the back office to run on its own.
Week 1 - Inventory your middle work
Spend one week being deliberate about what you touch. Every time an admin task lands on you, write it down in a simple list. By the end of the week you'll have 30-80 items. Group them:
- Recurring: supplier invoices, payroll checks, weekly reports, compliance renewals
- Triggered: an email arrives and you do X; a job closes and you do Y
- Scheduled: every Monday, every month-end, every quarter
- Judgement: genuinely needs you - new vendor, pricing change, strategic call
Most of your list will be the first three. That's the work you're automating. The fourth group stays with you (and should - those are the decisions that earn your salary).
Week 2 - Describe the business
Take the list from Week 1 and write it up in plain English, as if you were explaining your operation to a new COO. Per category:
- "Supplier invoices land in accounts@. Most are under $500 and match a PO. Those I want approved and filed. Anything over $500, or anything with a variance, I want to review."
- "When a job closes in simPRO, I want the invoice drafted and sent, the SWMS pack filed to the customer's Drive folder, and the technician paid their commission."
- "Every Monday 7am I want revenue, cash flow, and pipeline numbers from Xero, simPRO, and HubSpot delivered to my inbox, with anomalies flagged."
Write 10-30 of these. Don't worry about perfection. Writing them down is the hard part.
Week 3 - Scaffold and connect
Put your description into an operations hub that sits above your stack. The hub's job is to read your description, scaffold the workflows, triggers, approvals, dashboards, and delegation rules inside itself, and connect to the tools you already use.
You'll spend a couple of afternoons this week:
- Connecting credentials for your key tools (accounting, email, FSM, calendar)
- Reviewing the scaffolded workflows and tweaking the ones that miss something
- Setting approval gates on the workflows that should loop you in
By end of Week 3 the hub is running. You're watching it handle things you used to do.
Week 4 - Step back
This is the hardest week. The hub is running, but your instinct is to check on it constantly. Don't.
Instead:
- Watch the approval queue. Approve or reject the things it routes to you. Don't touch the things it doesn't route.
- Watch the audit log at end-of-day. You'll see 40-60 actions Sprigr ran without you. That's the point.
- If something runs wrong, describe the correction in plain English. The AI rewires; the workflow picks up.
- Track your hours. Most owners reclaim 10-15 hours in Week 4. You'll feel the difference.
The 90-day version
By day 90 the hub has been running for two months, your team has adapted to the new rhythm, and your list of "things I want to automate next" has grown. That's normal - the hub compounds. You'll keep adding descriptions; AI keeps scaffolding; the platform keeps running.
What changes permanently is your week. You stop being the admin bottleneck. The back office runs. You get to do the work you were supposed to be doing - the strategy, the team, the next move.
That's what a self-driving company looks like. Not flashy. Just quiet.