The Sentence That Sounds Like Efficiency

A partner needs a competitor overview before a call on Thursday.

They think about giving it to an analyst. Then they think about what that involves. Explaining the format. Explaining which competitors matter and why. Digging out last quarter's version as an example. Reading the draft. Sending it back. Reading it again.

Forty minutes of explaining to save two hours of work. On a busy Tuesday, that maths loses.

So they do it themselves. And they are right. That is the problem.

What You Are Actually Paying

Every task you hand over costs you three things. Explaining it. Checking it. Fixing it.

Use your own numbers. A partner at roughly £200 an hour spends forty minutes explaining, twenty reviewing, fifteen correcting. That is about £250 of partner time spent on a task worth far less than that to do.

Once is fine. The problem is that most firms pay it again next time, and the time after that, because the brief was only ever spoken out loud.

That is the tax. Not the work. The explaining, rebuilt from scratch every single time.

Expensed, Not Capitalised

You already know how this works.

A spoken brief is an expense. It gets used up on the spot and leaves nothing behind. Ten similar tasks means ten full briefings, all at senior rates.

A written brief is an asset. Write it once and you reuse it. The second task costs a fraction of the first. By the tenth it costs almost nothing.

Same work. Same people. Completely different cost.

Most deal teams expense every brief they give. Then they wonder why delegating never frees up any time.

Why Nobody Writes It Down

Because writing it down always costs more than just getting on with it.

The task is urgent. The document is not. Nobody gets thanked for writing down how a competitor overview should look, and nobody sets a deadline for it. So every time, the easy choice is to explain it out loud again.

Sensible each time. Expensive over a year.

It also gets worse as you get busier. The less time a senior has to explain something, the more they end up doing it themselves.

What Works

Write it down the second time you ask, not the first. When you brief the same thing twice, stop and write it down. One page: what it is for, how it should be structured, how deep to go, which sources to use, and a link to a good example. You have already done the thinking. You are just refusing to do it a third time.

Describe the output, not the task. "Research these five competitors" gets you something you will rewrite. "One page, revenue and positioning for each, flag where they are stronger than the target, sourced" gets you something you can use. The detail is what makes handing it over work.

Put feedback into the document, not the draft. When work comes back wrong, do not quietly fix it yourself. Update the one-pager instead. Fixing it silently teaches nobody, and you will pay the same cost again next quarter.

Do This Week

Pick one task your seniors keep doing themselves because explaining it feels slower. A competitor overview. A first-pass screen. A pre-meeting brief.

Write the one-page brief for that task. Twenty minutes.

Then give the next one to someone else and see what comes back. If it is close, you have stopped paying that cost every time and started paying it once.

You cannot hand over work you have never described. So describe it once, in writing, and stop paying for it every time.