GOAS — How to Find £100k in Profit, Without a Hundred Small Wins

The four-week test

Here's a genuinely useful, slightly uncomfortable question: if someone was away for four weeks — not one, not two, a full month — would it make a material difference to your business, specifically to profit? People do go on holiday for two or three weeks at a time, and things carry on fine. Stretch that same thought experiment to four weeks, honestly, for a specific role. If the honest answer is "not really," that role is worth questioning — not necessarily the person, the role as it's currently scoped.

This isn't about being harsh for its own sake. It's about noticing that "busy" and "valuable" get treated as the same thing far more often than they actually are.

What the test is actually asking

A "no" to the four-week test isn't automatically a redundancy conversation. It's a role review. Is there real crossover with another role? Is the work genuinely focused, but there's simply not enough of it, or what there is isn't valuable enough to justify the cost? Could more of it be automated, or handled by AI, or blended into a role that already exists? And for senior hires specifically: is this person actually driving value on their own, or are they becoming something you have to manage — a cost with a manager attached, not a multiplier?

A real example

A senior team had been built mostly from within — people on ordinary pay, not spectacular, but genuinely effective, most of them promoted up from junior roles and given real room to grow. It worked. They did exactly what the business needed.

Then a decision was made to bring in someone considerably more experienced, at a much higher pay bracket. The implicit goal was obvious enough it never needed saying out loud: someone paid that much more should meaningfully increase the profitability of whatever they were put in charge of. That's the entire justification for the extra cost.

It didn't happen. Profit in that area didn't grow — it went down. The new hire restructured parts of their team along the way, which added further cost on top. The net effect wasn't a more valuable senior function. It was a more expensive one, delivering less than the less-experienced, lower-cost team it replaced.

The senior hire, brought in to increase profitability

Defend

GOAS Score: 3/10

ShouldMeaningfully increase the profitability of the area they were put in charge of — the entire justification for the higher cost.

Was actuallyProfit in that area fell, and a team restructure under the new hire added further cost on top.

Higher cost, lower output than the team it replaced

The lesson isn't "never hire senior people." It's that a senior hire carries an implicit goal the same as any campaign or subscription does, and it deserves the same scrutiny — not an assumption that experience and pay bracket alone guarantee the return.

Everyone's busy. Fewer businesses are actually more profitable for it.

Ask almost anyone and they're busy, stretched, got too much on. That's rarely the useful question. The useful question is what, specifically, they're busy with — and whether it needs doing at all, whether it needs doing by them, or whether it could be done a different way entirely. "Busy" is not evidence of value. It's just evidence of activity, and the two get confused constantly.

What £100k actually looks like, found this way

Not one silver bullet — a small number of honest structural reviews, each one real on its own. This is an illustrative composition, built to show the shape of it, not a specific business's real figures.

Bar chart showing three structural moves totalling £100,000 in annual savings: right-sizing an over-scoped senior hire (£40,000), blending or automating two support roles (£35,000), and one Defend-job fix elsewhere (£25,000)

Three or four support-level roles around the £25k mark are often where the smaller structural gains live too — not by cutting people reflexively, but by genuinely asking whether the work could be automated, blended into an existing role, or paired differently between a senior and junior hire so the senior person is actually driving value, not just managing headcount.

How this fits the framework

This is the same principle as the second-hire problem, applied at the senior end instead of the entry level — a role's job should be evaluated against a real goal, regardless of how experienced or expensive the person in it is. The bigger the pay bracket, the bigger the implicit goal, and the more that goal deserves checking, not less.