Small businesses spend more time on admin than growing their business
Startups Magazine Startups Editorial
UK small business owners spend 11 hours a week on admin, nearly double what they spend on growth. Many now say AI feels like hiring an extra staff member.
Turns out running a small business in Britain looks a lot like drowning in paperwork with a smile on your face. New research from American Express and Small Business Saturday UK, based on a survey of 1,000 owners of micro, small and medium-sized companies, found that entrepreneurs spend roughly 11 hours a week — about six working days a month — wrestling with admin and finance tasks. Sales and business development, the stuff that actually grows a company, gets just 3.6 days a month. That's less than two-thirds the time.
The numbers explain a lot about why growth feels so hard for so many owners. Over half, 54%, say paperwork actively gets in the way of running their business, and 36% point to their own lack of capacity as the single biggest obstacle to expansion. One in five are clocking 60-plus hour weeks just to keep things moving. And yet, oddly, most of them would do it again. Some 85% call entrepreneurship the best professional development they've ever had, and 65% say it's boosted their confidence over the past year. There's a strange resilience running through this data — people exhausted by admin who still love the job.
AI is emerging as the tool many owners hope will buy back some of that lost time. Among those looking to hand off tasks, a third say they'd use generative AI for general admin, and almost a quarter would lean on it for finance and accounting work. One in five already think of AI as something close to an extra employee. Beyond grunt work, 41% of current AI users say they use it for content creation or editing, and 29% have used it to pick up new skills or get business advice — a sign that AI adoption among small firms is starting to move past novelty and into daily workflow.
Ruchi Sharma of American Express framed AI as a way to help small business owners reclaim hours without losing the human judgment that drives their companies. Michelle Ovens of Small Business Saturday UK made a similar point, but with a caveat: with 5.7 million small businesses in the UK, the opportunity only matters if owners actually get practical support to use these tools well. That's the real gap here — not whether AI can save time, but whether the people who need it most have the guidance to make it stick.
My take
Nobody should be shocked that small business owners are drowning in admin — that's basically the founding condition of running a company with no back office. What's more interesting is how quickly AI has gone from buzzword to genuine coping mechanism, with a fifth of owners already treating it like an extra hire. The real test isn't whether the tech works; it's whether banks, trade bodies and government actually bother teaching Britain's 5.7 million small business owners how to use it, instead of just cheering from the sidelines.
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