Momentum answers
Should I hire an assistant or automate admin work?
It depends on the kind of admin work piling up. Tasks that require judgment calls specific to the business — vetting a new hire, handling an unusual client situation — need a person. Repetitive, rule-based tasks — sending a standard reminder, compiling a status report — are usually cheaper and faster to automate first, before adding headcount to do them.
Hiring an assistant to do work that could be automated tends to recreate the same bottleneck one step later: the assistant still has to be trained, still has to remember the steps, and still becomes a single point of failure if they're out sick or leave.
A useful order of operations is to automate the repetitive, well-defined parts first, then hire — or delegate to existing staff — for whatever judgment-based work is left over. That person ends up doing higher-value work instead of the parts a system could have handled.