The owner’s running around: the hidden cost of every small business

It’s nine in the morning, and someone in customer service asks: "Has the customer’s order gone out yet?" Simple question. Not such a simple answer. Someone has to open the ERP, dig up the supplier’s email, ask whoever handles shipping on WhatsApp, update the task card and, only then, reply to the customer. In a small business, that someone is almost always the owner.

I call it the running around. It isn’t the work you chose when you started the company. It’s the back-and-forth between systems and people to find out where things stand, who’s waiting on what and what fell through the cracks. And it has a cost almost nobody measures.

Why the running around lands on the owner

In a small business, people are the link between systems. The order is in the ERP. The supplier’s promise is in the purchasing inbox. What was agreed with the customer is in a WhatsApp chat. The next step is on a task board, if it’s anywhere. None of these places talk to each other, and what ties them together is someone’s head.

Over time, that head becomes yours. Not because your team lacks good people, but because you’re the one who knows a little about everything. The team learns that asking you is faster than looking. And you become the company’s search engine.

The cost that never shows up on the P&L

The running around never makes it into a report, but you pay for it in other ways:

• Fragmented attention. Every "quick question" breaks your train of thought. The day ends full, and yet nothing important got solved.
• The company moves at the owner’s speed. If you’re in a meeting or on vacation, the answers stop. The bottleneck isn’t the team; it’s the path to the information.
• Promises kept in your head. The deadline agreed on the phone, the discount promised in the hallway, the supplier who said "it ships Friday." Whatever isn’t written down depends on your memory.
• Customers left waiting. While the information passes from hand to hand, the customer is the one waiting on the other end. Sometimes they get a date nobody confirmed.

None of this is anyone’s fault. It’s how almost every small business grows: first come the sales, then the systems, and connecting them is left to people.

Does hiring more people fix it?

Sometimes, yes. A good operations hire changes any owner’s day. But notice what happens: the new person opens the same five systems, asks the same questions and, when context is missing, who do they ask? You.

Hiring help hands the running around to someone else. It doesn’t make it go away.

I believe in people. Good people should handle what needs people: negotiating, deciding, serving customers well, creating. The waste is spending their time, and yours, hunting for information and chasing answers.

A 15-minute exercise

Before you change anything, measure it. On Friday, grab a pen and paper and do this:

• List everything you chased during the week: a late order, a supplier who didn’t reply, a boleto (bank slip) nobody could find, a customer asking again.
• Next to each item, write down where the information was: the ERP, the bank, email, WhatsApp, a spreadsheet or someone’s head.
• Mark with a D, for decision, whatever truly needed you: a discount, a negotiation, a hard conversation.
• Mark with a C, for chasing, whatever was just looking things up, pulling them together, letting people know and asking again.
• Count up the Ds and the Cs.

My guess is the Cs will win by a mile. That’s where the hidden cost lives, and that’s the part you can take off your plate without losing control. The decisions stay yours.

What Will takes off your plate

That’s why I created Hey Will. It started in my own company, to take this running around out of my day. The idea is simple: every company deserves a right hand that knows the systems, chases things down between systems and people, and only brings in whoever needs to decide.

Will works in the systems your company already uses. For a store like Lume Casa, a fictional example, that means Bling, Nuvemshop, Mercado Livre, the banks through Open Finance (regulated by Brazil’s Central Bank), Gmail, WhatsApp and ClickUp. Remember the Cs? That’s what Will takes care of:

• Late order: Will finds in Bling what hasn’t shipped, figures out why and tells whoever needs to know.
• Supplier who didn’t reply: Will follows up on Gmail or WhatsApp, with the order and the date in the message, and follows up again on the agreed day.
• Boleto nobody could find: Will finds it in the email, checks it against the bank statement through Open Finance and adds it to the week’s payment list.
• Customer asking again: Will pulls together the order in Nuvemshop, the invoice in Bling and the tracking in Melhor Envio, and replies with the right date.

When it’s done, Will tells you what it did and where each piece of information came from. You decide what Will does on its own and what it brings to you. Payments and anything you mark as sensitive always go through you, and everything gets a receipt.

That leaves you with the Ds: negotiating, deciding, serving customers well, creating. If your company’s running around looks like this, get started with Will and tell us what you still chase by hand. That’s where Will starts.