Your Back Office Is Obsolete with Adam Spector

We just said you need to generate X number of qualified leads a month in your given verticals. And each person had to just generate a certain number of qualified leads. Man, the team really struggled with that, like getting that metric. And they really struggled, really pushed back, didn't want to do it, thought I was asking them to do more work. They were like, this seems unfair. You're asking us to do more work than we're getting paid for and we haven't gotten a raise, etc., etc. I'm like, well, like what I try to tell people and I really believe this, I am so happy to give people raises or promotions if they are demonstrating a lot of value.

Welcome to Frank Growth. I'm Jason Shafton and I run growth consulting firm Winston Francois. Around here, we tell the truth about growing, the good, the bad, and the can't say it out loud ugly. Every episode, we get tactical with operators, investors, and builders about what works, what breaks, and what to do next. No fluff, no vanity metrics, no hustle theater, just signal. This is Frank Growth. Let's get into it. Today we've got Adam Spector, Fire the Team, Build the Platform. Before we bring Adam on, a quick riff on today's topic. Most founders think they have a team problem. They don't. They have a curiosity problem. The people on their GTM team are executing the same plays they ran 2 years ago while the tools underneath them have completely changed. And founders keep coaching and coaxing and retraining. And when the actual answer is to build the platform the team should be using and hire operators who can build with you and for you. Here are 3 things that I see go wrong. Hiring execution over agency. Screening for past resumes instead of whether the person can figure out a tool that did not exist a quarter ago. Protecting headcount that will not protect itself. Keeping people comfortable on the old playbook while the business drifts. And 3, confusing activity with leverage. Busy GTM teams that generate motion but not compounding output. Here's what actually works. Build the platform you wish your team had. Stop waiting for the market to sell it to you. Second, fire the incurious ruthlessly. Not because they are bad people, because they are building the wrong company with you. And 3, buy back your time before you buy more headcount. Ops leverage is cheaper and faster than hiring. That's the frame we'll use with Adam today. Let's get tactical. Adam, welcome to Frank Growth.

Great to be here. Thank you for having me.

You are the founder and CEO of Chore. Talk about Chore and the end of admin and, you know, maybe just give us like the one-sentence version of what you actually do and, and who you do it for.

Yeah. So we run essentially, we are a fractional human resources, HR team, fractional chief of staff. We run the entire back office for essentially small businesses, but we really focus on early stage venture-backed tech companies. So 5 to 75 FTEs, we are their entire team. The idea of companies today having a team of people who are managing back office operations like human resources, to me is utterly insane. If you look at all the public company comps that are out there, Cloudflare was recently laid off 20% of their workforce, mostly in back office and somewhat actually in marketing as Well, why did they do that? Because the job is mostly people pushing paper and pressing a lot of buttons. Now, unfortunately, you still need people to push those buttons, but you don't need a full-time group of people doing it, especially when those people are not part of your core team of product builders and product salespeople. That is the core of what a company is, is someone who knows how to build your core product that is differentiated, and someone who knows how to sell your differentiated product. The idea of having back office people that you as CEO need to manage, even though you've never had that experience before, and it's not your core competency, is to me utterly insane.

You actually raised I think $10 million and went through the whole AI services hype cycle and came out the other side now profitable, which a lot of companies in your shoes cannot say the same of right now. What was that pivot like? Tell me how we got here.

The thesis was the same as what I just described. The idea that people are reinventing the wheel, like literally people run human resources the same way it was run 400 years ago when the rise of the East India Company, which is sort of the first modern corporation, literally some dude, I'm sure it was a dude or guy, you know, 400 years ago had a ledger and he's like, what? How many hours did you work? Well, Here are your coins. Thank you for your work. And that's how you got payroll. Today, it's no different except that it's on a computer and someone clicked, oh, how much did Jason work? Yep, click. Gusto will now pay you out or Rippling will pay you. But it's still someone doing this work. That's crazy. Like, why, why would you do it that way? And that was the whole thesis of my last company. We were going to automate all of that. Turned out it's really hard because everything's an edge case. Edge cases are hard to automate. We were unable to raise our next round, so we split the company in 2. I took the services team, basically said we need to start being profitable and not subsidizing this anymore. And that was 3 and a half years ago, and that was what became Shore.

So speaking of venture, your primary growth channel is customer-to-customer referrals, not paid, not VCs referring in. Why has that been so sticky for a back office ops company?

I wish it were even stronger. I mean, look, we try to do everything in go-to-market and there is no silver bullet. Um, I just read an update from a company I'm really close with last night about how they've had real trouble with go-to-market. And a lot of companies are having major issues, as I'm sure you know well. But for us, in the end, for back office work, this is a trust Base sale. So companies come to us because they need this work done. They need to feel comfortable trusting that we will do a good job. They need to know, hey, can I trust— like, I don't know why, don't get me wrong, I actually don't know why people feel like, well, just because I hire someone full-time and they're reporting directly to me, I can trust them more than I can trust an outsourced vendor. I would actually argue it's the opposite. In some cases, an outsourced vendor, I have insurance, I am super aligned with you to make sure we have a great product, we do a great job every single day, we are really well aligned, whereas internal people, I don't know, like, if I were a bigger company, I wouldn't want some random junior person in the company sitting in a corner running payroll and seeing what everyone's making right now and then being annoyed that they're not making as much as other people. Like, that sounds worse to me than an outsourced vendor. With all that said, I believe our sale is a trust-based sale. Hence, referrals is really powerful.

You also said on LinkedIn recently that premature hiring is almost always the cause of startup problems. What is the exact mistake founders are making that you've seen? I know you've invested a bunch of companies as well as being an entrepreneur yourself.

I think the biggest mistakes so many founders make is they still have a traditional mindset. I think the newer companies less and less so, but people still say, look, we have a problem, just go hire someone to solve it and figure it out. I think the first and foremost thing you need to do is say no. How can we solve this with AI? And this is what I'm trying to do with my team every single day and rethink things. Can we do this with AI? Do we need a team to go do the— take these steps? Do I need someone to push paper all around? And that's like, so we had a head of go-to-market at Shore and we no longer do. He was pulling data such as like our overall sales metrics and that data. Well, I created a Claude project tied into our CRM that pulls that data for me every week and sends me all the data and gives me graphs and does all that work. I don't need that anymore. And we're also rethinking like, hey, how many managers do you need for every single individual on the team, right? Do you need as many managers? Um, we're growing, which is obviously great, and we're constantly saying, hey, do we need to hire more people to support our growth? And we're a services company. So traditionally services companies needed to hire more people to support their growth. It was kind of a 1-to-1 ratio of growth to people. We're trying to break that curve and you can keep growing and have fewer people, and AI is enabling that as well.

One of the things you did was analyze hundreds of founder conversations before they became customers. What's a sentence that just kept showing up and why did that matter as you thought about how you would build Chore and go and go find these folks?

I think the probably biggest one that always shows up is like, wow, that seems expensive. And like, that's always hard to hear like that. That pains me because it means like that we've done a poor job explaining the value or that customers don't have a good handle on the value. On the other hand, what that also pushes us to do is to get our price to such a low point that it becomes a no-brainer to purchase it. To be clear, right, right now with Chore, we average between 2 to 3% of total monthly expenses for customers. That means 97% of their money is being spent on building product and go-to-market. 3% is nothing by comparison. The average company, by the way, is 10%. So you can look it up.

Yeah. So it's a, it's a third or a fifth, and that still feels expensive.

So at least 10% for you go look at like Google, like, you know, how much money does Google spend making sure all the Google engineers have all the best food, candy, buses, everything to make their lives so easy. That they can go back to working. Now, why does Google do that though? They do it because, I mean, tell me if this is correct. I assume that I've not worked at Google. I worked at Twitter for a while, but like the reason Google does it is because they know the value, incremental value of that engineer or that internal teammate doing their job well and not stressing about anything else is so high. And then I talk to founders and they're like, oh, I think I should do this work myself because that seems expensive. And I'm like, dude, we're talking like $1,500 a month. You don't think if we get 10 to 20 hours more for you because you're not dealing with any of this back office BS, You can't go get another customer, sell another customer, build a new product feature. If you don't have that much belief in yourself, then your company is going to fail anyways.

Yes.

And you don't get it. But we hear that a lot and company founders just don't get it.

Let's talk about, you know, the moment that you decided to go a different direction with your own go-to-market motion. So we just talked about the cost of admin and then there's cost of R&D and building products and then taking those products to market. And, you know, even Chore, you're trying to go to market, you're trying to grow Chore. And we talked about how, you know, you, you've kind of hit the reset button there. So walk me through what happened and why.

Yeah, I mean, so 2 things happened. One, we were, we were getting to a point where we were not sure about where things were going. We were not happy with the results that we were getting from our go-to-market team. Right. So the results just weren't what they should be for the amount we were spending. That started to become an issue. I brought in an external consultant to help us think through some of those things at the same time, and I probably was doing too much at once. To be clear, our head of go-to-market needed to leave for some personal reasons. And so that gave me an opportunity to start really digging into a lot of the things that were happening and where we were spending money. And also with the, with the We had we put some new metrics in place for the everyone on the go-to-market team, which is pretty simple. We just said you need to generate X number of qualified leads a month in your given verticals, and each person had to just generate a certain number of qualified leads. Man, the team really struggled with that, like getting that metric, and they really struggled, really pushed back, didn't want to do it. Thought we I was asking them to do more work. They were like like this seems unfair. You're asking us to do more work than we're getting paid for, and we haven't gotten a raise, etc., etc. I'm like well, like what I try to tell people, and I really believe this: I am so happy to give people raises or promotions if they are demonstrating. A lot of value, but like, I'm now your new manager, right? So your manager has now left. I'm now your new manager. I'm asking you to have a new goal and metric and target, not to do more work, just to refocus the outcomes. So I know we're getting outcomes that we care about and can like drive the business forward. And you're asking me for promotion, but you haven't figured any of that out. You haven't shown me why we should do that. And so it got to a point pretty clearly that like it was not gonna be a fit long-term, which was a shame. The people are great, but it, it was not gonna be a fit if that was the mindset that they had, which I think everyone in the world of AI has to have a growth mindset where it's like, I'm going to use all the tools at my disposal. And like, okay, get mad at me as a founder and leader if I'm not giving you the tools. But if you're saying, hey, Adam, I need access to Claude or this or that, within reason, I'm going to say yes to all of it. I want to enable you to be successful. But if you don't have that mindset, you're not going to be successful here or anywhere.

Speaking of that mindset, I think one of the things you've talked about is curiosity and being a builder, right? Is this a hiring problem, a management problem, an AI era problem? What is— can you point to what is the thing that can ensure that you build a team of curious builders?

Yeah, I mean, look, we try really hard to do that. I do think I took my— the ball a bit with our go-to-market team a lot and kind of wasn't paying attention the way I should have been. And I do think you have to get people who just ask— they have to come in with this deep energy related to the topic that they care about, right? Are you someone who cares super deeply about what we're trying to build and why? And you can show that perspective. So an example with our sort of new sales guy that we hired, part of how we hired him, he's the only salesperson who reached out to me on WhatsApp and followed up multiple times to make sure we got on a call to do his sort of interview. Other salespeople just didn't.

Well, that's wild because like, that's literally the job. Right?

Correct. But yet I think so many people don't do that. They don't prove out that this is why they're great.

So you're building Ollie, which is an AIOps copilot trained on data from over 500 companies. What is that bet? What are you betting on?

What's crazy is the world has now flipped and now we are able to start using AI to start to automate a lot of this work again, because AI is so much more flexible than previous code was. And so we're able to automate a lot of this work. And so Ollie, the idea is like you now have, just like you have Claude to have discussions with you about everything, or ChatGPT, you can have Ollie discuss things about your actual underlying data that is relevant. So what is relevant to your actual business? What is critical? And you can— and it knows information about your business and the tasks that have been happening. So you want to say, hey, when did I hire Jason and how much am I paying Jason? When do I give Jason the last promotion? What are the key deal details about? When did he finish his background check? Or whatever it is that's related to your business specifically is what Ollie's able to do. And there's a ton of other cool things that are coming down the pipe as well that we're going to finally kind of realize the vision of what my last company was that we spun out of. We're able to do that now with AI and we're building that right now and I'm stoked. But in the end, what it comes down to is like, once again, you need someone to run your operations and the future is going to be not you building it yourself. Because once again, why would you like— you can rebuild a CRM, but you probably shouldn't rebuild a CRM because like the CRMs out there are pretty good and not crazy expensive. The goal is that operations will be the same way. Like, don't— you're not going to build this. We're going to build something better in operations than you will ever build. And we have a team to manage the part that humans still need to do. And that's an ideal outcome.

I like that. It feels right. A lot of service businesses are just like terrified that that kind of AI is the margin killer. You kind of seem to think that actually it's the opposite. Can you explain?

Yeah. So the reason I think it's the opposite is what will happen with AI is AI will drive down the price you can charge. So if your price gets driven down and you are unable to adapt, then yes, your margin will be destroyed clearly. On the other hand, if you can drive down your own price before AI does it for you and you can do it in a margin sort of neutral way so you can preserve your margins, then you actually expand your opportunity, right? I mean, not that price is the driver for everything in life. As long as the quality is there, lower prices are better. And expand your market. That's what I think companies, services-based companies who are using AI will be able to do.

I think that's right. You're kind of pushing this idea of growth by subtraction, and it's a frame for founders between this kind of $1 million and $5 million of ARR. What does that actually mean in practice for

them? Elon Musk is really famous for this, right? He's going to subtract so many things until it breaks and then put back the one thing that like they still need. We try to do this at Torar. We're not anywhere close to as good as Elon is at that, but like we try to say, okay, what can we remove here? What do we really need? And keep pushing the boundaries. And, and so every single day we're like, you know, just having a conversation with my head of operations about how many more people can we have per manager, right? So one of the issues we've had, just be very transparent, is I think our team has relied on their managers to troubleshoot issues that they might have, like challenges they're having with their clients in the work they're doing, right? Which is great. We want teamwork. We want everyone to help each other, but your manager shouldn't be a crutch. That's actually not being a good manager because our team should have the resources and tools to figure it out on their own, not just before I even do any searching with Ali or do anything else, go ping my manager. Like, that's not what your manager's there for. That wastes everyone's time. And so we're going to keep pushing the boundaries to the point where your manager won't have the time to be your crutch anymore.

What are managers for in the future of work?

I think there is going to be a point in the next year, maybe 2, at least for the fast-moving companies where managers are irrelevant anymore. I think we will get to a point where everyone knows how they're doing on a regular basis. They automatically get the updates from the system of, hey, how well are you doing? How much time are you spending? What our outcomes look like. Are your clients happy? You then automatically rate yourself on a scale that we prebuilt for how you're doing and where things are. We see those ratings. You maybe then talk with someone, cuz you still should talk with someone about it probably, but that's once a month maybe to review. Okay, great. Your stats look like this. Here's the target. What's the diff? How are you doing? And then you wanna talk, oh, I'm feeling sick here. This happened in my life. Okay, fine. That's all your manager's gonna do, essentially being there to have a human-to-human conversation. So we're not completely just at the whims of our AI overlords to some extent, but I'm not sure that managers have a lot more of a role.

When you think about how founders in these startups that are kind of right in the sweet spot of who you're working with, how they should think about hiring and where people are the most leveraged, what is the kind of audit that you think they should all run to really understand where there is opportunity to make the right hires versus extra bloat and expenses they don't need?

The framework that I use, I try to use regularly. I have an executive coach. He's wonderful. His name's Ari Meisel. His thesis in many cases is you should like automate, outsource, and there's another, it's like one more thing that he also does, like automate, outsource, and something else.

I think mine that's similar is eliminate, automate, delegate, something like that.

Same idea. Actually, delegate might be the other one. But yeah, I mean, so that's what people should be doing as a founder at all times. You should say, how little can I be doing in a year? Like there's going to be more things to do, but I don't want to be doing all the same things today. If I'm deeply buried in the weeds, Then I need to find a way to delegate that away, automate it, or outsource it. When it comes to back office, that is a thesis you should always have. Like once again, like it just pains me. Why is the founder doing this work? Or if they're like, I'm going to do it myself, that's insane. Or if I'm going to hire someone, also insane as we just talked about, why do you want to manage more people? And so yeah, you just delegate it if you can, but frankly you shouldn't delegate it to your own internal team because the team is building your core product. So you outsource it to companies like Turo.

You've worked with hundreds of companies on back office operations, admin. What is the most expensive mistake that you just see them make over and over again?

Probably the most expensive one is frankly spending any of their time on this. When I have a founder tell me, oh, I'm doing my own books, my own bookkeeping, I think that is just utterly— literally you can get bookkeeping for $200, $250 a month, get it done. And frankly, that price is going down too. You can find it for free if you look carefully enough. Why would you do it yourself? But I mean, that all those things add up. It's all this work that you should not be doing. The most expensive decision is thinking you as a founder, that what makes you a founder is doing back office chores. That is insane. Do not do it.

Good advice. All right. This is my favorite part of the show, Adam. So I have this lightning round I like to do at the end. Quick questions, quick answers. Tell me when you're ready.

Born ready.

All right. One metric that you look at every single morning.

I look at our sales stuff every week. I mean, the main metric I look at is I read a ton of information. So I read Techmeme every single morning religiously and have for 15, 16 years. That is not a metric that I look at, but it is information that I read and intake, which I think makes me a sort of, maybe not well-rounded because it's all tech related, but certainly a very focused leader.

What's one task every founder is still doing that they should have killed 6 months ago?

All HR management.

Finish this sentence. The founder who wins the next 5 years is the one who

automates 95% of their jobs that are being done internally.

Final lightning round question. What's something where you have automated it, you have delegated it, you've eliminated it that has completely transformed your life as a founder?

A lot of my EA's work, so I wouldn't say it transformed it, but it reduced our cost. And I told my EA I was going to do this. So I rebuilt a significant portion of what she does for me every single day with AI. It saves a ton of time for her, which gives her time to do other things that I have not been able to automate yet. And I'm going to keep doing that on a regular basis for a lot of these tasks.

Adam, this was exactly the conversation I wanted to have. I feel like you and I could talk for 2 more hours and talk about all sorts of interesting things, philosophical, existential, and practical. Where can people find you and where can they go if they want Chore to get the admin off their plate?

Yeah, absolutely. hirechore.com. So H-I-R-E Chore, C-H-O-R-E.com. Easy place to find us. I'm all over LinkedIn. Uh, so find me there a little bit less so on Twitter. And then just drop me a note and look, if you're curious about any of this stuff, how it works, or if you just wanna meet in person, and because of the AI stuff we're talking about, like these in-person-ish conversations are more and more valuable. Those are the best places to find me.

Adam, thanks for coming on.

Really appreciate you having me.

That was Adam Spector and a look at what it actually takes to run a company where the platform is doing the work and the team is building with you, not executing around you. Here are my quick top 3 from today. If you don't remember anything else, remember these. One, a company is builders and sellers. Everyone else is a line AI is already crossing out. The core of a company is the person who builds your differentiated product and the person who sells it. Everyone else is mostly moving information from one place to another and then measuring it. And that's exactly the work AI eats first. The question was never whether those tasks need doing. It's whether they need a full-time internal team doing them. 2, tokens get cheaper every month. People get more expensive every month. Adam's sharpest framing, you're replacing compute A in a human brain with compute B in a data And only one of those costs is failing. He's honest that in the short term, intelligence might actually cost more as the labs stop subsidizing it, but the direction is set. Build your cost structure around the curve that's bending down, not the one bending up. 3, before you hire, ask if AI can do it, then outsource what's left. His operating principle, borrowed from his coach Ari Meisel, automate, outsource, delegate, comes down to one founder question: how little can I be doing in a year? Your own team should be building the core product. The back office is $1,500 a month, not a headcount. And if you don't believe your time is worth more than that, the company has bigger problems anyway. All right, here's one action you can do this week in 10 minutes or less. Take the next role you're about to hire for, or the task you're about to hand to a new person, and write out what exactly they would do day to day. Go line by line and ask, could AI or an outside vendor do this? If most of it is moving and measuring information, don't post that job. That's Frank Growth. If this gave you something you can use this week, follow the show and share it with one operator or founder who needs it. I'm Jason Shafton from Winston Francois. We help tech companies build sustainable, repeatable growth with a proven operating Show notes and takeaways are in the description. Be frank and keep growing.