Sound familiar?

A partner skims a CIM because nobody pre-screened it.

They navigate a data room themselves because the tracker wasn't built. They chase the adviser for an update because the associate is tied up. They fix the deck at 9pm because nobody caught the error earlier.

None of it needed their judgement. All of it needed their time.

The maths

A partner costs north of £400k all-in. That's around £200 an hour.

When that time goes on admin, formatting, chasing, and fixing, you're paying partner rates for work that should cost a fraction of that.

But the financial waste isn't even the real problem.

The real problem is what didn't happen in those hours. The management team that didn't get a sharper question. The deal risk that didn't get properly stress-tested. The IC debate that ran out of time.

That's where the cost lands.

Why it keeps happening

It's not laziness. It's structure, or the lack of it.

When briefs are vague, seniors rewrite them. When output formats aren't set, seniors fix them. When ownership isn't clear, seniors fill the gap. Each moment looks like a senior doing what seniors do. Cumulatively, it's a slow drain on your most valuable resource.

What to actually do about it

Audit one week. Have a senior log what they did, hour by hour. Then categorise each task: did it need their judgement, or just someone competent? Most firms are shocked by the split.

Set output standards. If an analyst knows exactly what format a partner needs (how deep, what structure, what question to answer), the output arrives ready to use. If they don't, the partner compensates. Define the standard once, use it every time.

Build a brief template. For every external meeting or call, one page lands in the senior's inbox the day before. What to probe. What's unresolved. What changed since they last looked. Five minutes of reading replaces twenty minutes of catch-up.

Name an owner for every task. Ambiguous ownership defaults to the most senior person available. Be explicit about who owns what on a live process, and check it at kickoff, not after the ball gets dropped.

Protect the first hour. Senior focus time is most likely to disappear in the morning. Block it. No status calls, no formatting reviews, no quick questions. One hour of uninterrupted thinking is worth more than three hours of reactive work.

The question worth asking

Look at your senior team's last five days.

How much of that time touched something only they could do?

If you don't have a clear answer, that's the answer.