The Decision Nobody Frames Properly

At some point the operational drag gets loud enough to act on. Deals are slipping. Seniors are doing junior work. Somebody says we need more capacity.

Then the conversation jumps straight to cost. What does a junior cost, what does an offshore team cost, what does a firm cost.

That's the wrong axis. Every one of these models can be made to work on price. They differ on something that doesn't appear on the invoice: what happens to the knowledge after the work is done.

Option One: Hire a Junior

The default. Real upside: they're in the room, they absorb context, and over time they become genuinely valuable.

The costs are the ones firms consistently understate. You're hiring for a permanent need with an uncertain load. Recruitment takes months. Ramp-up takes longer, and during ramp-up they consume senior time rather than release it. And when they leave in two years, most of what they learned leaves with them.

Right answer when the work is continuous, judgement-heavy, and you want to build a bench. Expensive answer when the work is process work you've never written down.

Option Two: Outsource It

Give outsourcing its due. On cost per hour it wins outright. It scales up and down. For genuinely commoditised, high-volume, well-specified work, it's the correct choice and it isn't close. Data entry. List building. Standard document processing.

Where it breaks is specification. Outsourced work needs defining, checking, and re-explaining. Every task carries a briefing cost, and that cost falls on someone senior. Cheap hours plus expensive briefing frequently totals more than the model it replaced.

The deeper problem is memory. The provider's team rotates. Context resets. Nothing compounds. Year three looks exactly like year one, because the knowledge never accumulated anywhere you own.

Option Three: Bring in Consultants

Excellent at diagnosis. They will tell you accurately what's broken, and often they'll be right.

Then they leave, and the deck goes in a drawer. Consultants are built to recommend, not to run. If your problem is that nobody owns the CRM hygiene, a strategy on CRM hygiene doesn't fix it. Someone has to actually do it, every week, forever.

Buy consulting for a decision. Don't buy it for an operation.

Option Four: Embed the Capability

Someone who works inside your workflows, on your systems, to documented processes you own.

The distinction that matters: the process gets written down as it runs. SOPs, named owners, defined triggers. The knowledge lands in your firm rather than in a provider's staff or a departing analyst's head.

That changes the economics over time. Year one you buy capacity. Year three you own an operating system. One that survives turnover, onboards the next person in days, and gets cheaper to run as it matures.

What Actually Decides It

Ask two questions about the work in front of you.

Is it specified? If yes, outsourcing is efficient. If no, outsourcing just moves the specification burden onto your seniors.

Does it need to compound? Sector maps, target lists, deal history. If the same knowledge gets rebuilt every quarter, any model without institutional memory is renting the same thing twice.

Most operational drag around deal teams fails both tests. It's unspecified, and it compounds. That's the gap embedded capability exists to fill.

The Question Worth Asking

Look at the last operational problem you solved by adding capacity.

Twelve months on, does your firm know more than it did? Or did you just rent hands and keep the same gap?

If you're weighing this now, reply to this email and tell me what the work looks like. I'll tell you honestly which of the four fits, including when it isn't us.