What's your return on investment?
"Is this worth it?" is the right question to ask before bringing in any kind of support — but most founders answer it with a gut feeling rather than an actual calculation. The number is usually more convincing than the gut feeling, in either direction.
Quick answer: ROI on operational support comes from two places — the hours it frees up for higher-value work, and the costs it helps you avoid (mistakes, missed deadlines, a bad full-time hire). Both are calculable, not just a feeling.
Start with your own hourly value
Here's a simple way to make this concrete. Say your time, at its highest-leverage use, is reasonably worth £150 an hour — a conservative figure for most founders once you weigh in deals closed, decisions made and relationships built. If operational admin and coordination are eating even 10 hours of your week, that's £1,500 a week, or roughly £6,000 a month, spent on work that doesn't actually require your personal judgement.
Compare that to what support actually costs
Chief-of-Staff-level support typically runs £2,500 to £4,500 a month, covering significantly more than 10 hours a week of that same work — and none of it landing back on your desk. Run your own numbers the same way: multiply your realistic hourly value by the hours currently lost to admin and coordination, then compare that figure to what support would actually cost. For most founders past the earliest pre-seed stage, the gap is larger than it feels before you've done the maths.
The question isn't whether you can do it yourself. It's whether doing it yourself is the best use of the hour.
Factor in the cost of what goes wrong without support
This is the part that's easy to miss: a missed follow-up with an investor, a board pack rushed together at midnight, a hiring decision made without proper process. These costs are real even when they're not on an invoice, and they tend to happen more often exactly when a founder is most stretched — which is also when support would help most. A single missed investor follow-up during a live raise can cost you more than a year of operational support would have.
What this looks like over a year
Put the two sides together and the picture gets clearer. On the cost side: roughly £30,000 to £54,000 a year for Chief-of-Staff-level support at the figures above. On the return side: around £72,000 of your own time freed up annually (10 hours a week at £150/hour), plus whatever you avoid in missed follow-ups, rushed board materials, or a mis-hire made under time pressure. Even before counting the avoided mistakes, the time alone usually clears the cost by a wide margin — which is why this is worth calculating properly rather than estimating on a gut feeling.
Compare against the alternative, not against zero
The honest comparison isn't "support vs. no cost." It's "fractional support now vs. a full-time hire later, once the gap has already cost you something." Priced against that alternative, embedded operational support is usually the better-value option, not the more expensive one.
Next step
If you want an honest, specific number rather than a rough estimate, it's worth working through your actual numbers in a conversation rather than guessing.