For three years, I was the most expensive employee in my own business — and I was doing the lowest-value work.
I ran a hospitality portfolio with five properties across regional Queensland and New South Wales. We had good providers. A competent bookkeeper. A reliable payroll bureau. An IT company that kept things running. An HR consultant we could call when something tricky came up. An accountant who handled the year-end compliance.
Each of them did their job well. None of them could see the whole picture. And the only person who could — the only person who sat at the intersection of all five — was me.
Every month, the bookkeeper would send the P&L for each property. The payroll provider would send the pay run summary. The IT company would send an invoice I didn’t fully understand. The HR consultant would flag something that needed the bookkeeper’s input to resolve.
And I’d sit there — usually on a Sunday evening — trying to make sense of how all these pieces connected. Forwarding emails between providers who didn’t have each other’s context. Answering the same question from two different providers about the same event. Reconciling numbers that didn’t match because each provider was looking at a different slice of reality.
I call this the vendor coordination tax. It’s the time and cognitive load required to be the translation layer between providers who are each competent in their own domain but have no visibility into each other’s.
The tax doesn’t appear on any invoice. There’s no line item for “owner hours spent being the integration layer.” But when I tracked it honestly, it was consuming 8–12 hours per week of my time. At an imputed rate of $200 per hour — a conservative estimate of what my time was worth when deployed on business development or strategic decisions — that’s $80,000–$125,000 per year in invisible cost.
More than any single provider was charging me. More than I would have paid a full-time operations manager to coordinate it all.
The coordination problem was most visible when something changed. A new employee starting was the clearest example.
When we hired someone at one of our motels, it triggered work across four separate providers. The payroll bureau needed the employment details to set up the pay run. The accountant’s office needed to know about the super choice. The IT company needed to create login credentials and email access. The HR consultant needed to review or provide the employment contract.
Four providers. Four separate communications. Four timelines. And the only project manager for this process was me — or, more often, a motel manager who was already running a property full-time and shouldn’t have been managing onboarding logistics for the back-office.
What should have been a simple, repeatable process — new person starts, everything gets set up — became a multi-day coordination exercise every single time. Inevitably, something would fall through the cracks. The IT setup would be delayed because nobody told the IT company about the start date. The super choice form wouldn’t get processed because it went to the wrong provider first. The employment contract would reference the wrong Award classification because the HR consultant didn’t know what role the person was actually filling.
None of these were failures of competence. They were failures of integration. Each provider did their part correctly when they received the information — but nobody was responsible for making sure the information flowed to all parties at the right time.
The coordination tax isn’t just about time. It’s about the insights that never happen because nobody sees the connections.
When a bookkeeper looks at your P&L and sees labour costs increasing, they can tell you the number went up. What they can’t tell you is why — because they don’t see the payroll data. Was it overtime? A new hire? A rate increase from the Annual Wage Review? A classification change? The bookkeeper doesn’t know, because that’s the payroll provider’s domain.
When the IT company sees a spike in helpdesk tickets, they can resolve each ticket individually. What they can’t do is connect it to the three new starters who weren’t properly onboarded because the HR process didn’t include IT setup as a standard step.
When the HR consultant advises on a redundancy, they provide legally sound advice on process and entitlements. What they can’t assess is the financial impact on the business — because they don’t see the P&L or the cash flow forecast.
These context gaps don’t just slow things down. They prevent a category of insight that only emerges when someone can see across domains. The pattern that connects a payroll anomaly to a bookkeeping error to an IT issue to a compliance gap — that pattern is invisible to any single provider. It’s only visible to the person sitting at the intersection.
And in most small businesses, that person is the owner. Who is also the person with the least available time to be doing this analysis.
The turning point wasn’t a single event. It was the accumulation of three years of Sunday nights spent being a human middleware layer between competent providers who couldn’t see each other’s work.
I realised that the problem wasn’t the providers. They were good at what they did. The problem was the architecture. I had designed a back-office where integration was a person — me — rather than a system.
And I realised I wasn’t alone. Every business owner I spoke to who had reached the 10–30 employee stage was experiencing some version of the same problem. Different providers, different industries, same pattern: multiple competent specialists with no shared visibility, and the owner as the only person who could connect the dots.
The question I started asking wasn’t “how do I find better providers?” It was “what would it look like if someone else could see the whole picture?”
Not a dashboard that aggregates data from five systems into one screen. Not a marketplace that helps you find providers. But an actual team — people who understand finance, payroll, HR, IT, and operations — who work together, share context, and can see the connections that siloed providers never will.
That question is the origin of everything that came after.
If you recognise this pattern — if you’re the integration layer in your own business, spending hours each week being the translator between providers who don’t talk to each other — know that it’s not a personal failing. It’s a structural problem. And structural problems have structural solutions.