The named-person test

Strip the branding off every outsourced-support offer in this market and two models remain. In one, a task goes into a queue and a pool of interchangeable people works it: efficient, scalable, and priced accordingly. In the other, a named person does your work, only your work, every day. The brochures use the word dedicated for both. The test that tells them apart takes one question: can you name the person who did your work yesterday, and will the same name be true in a month?

Why agency work punishes the pool

Pool models are not a con; for genuinely interchangeable work — data entry, image processing, overnight typing — they are the right economics. Agency work is not interchangeable, because its value compounds in one head. The administrator who has served your tenancies for six months knows which landlord will only ever be telephoned, which block’s managing agent answers on Tuesdays, which contractor’s invoices arrive against the wrong reference. None of that survives rotation. Every new pair of hands resets it to zero, and the reset is invisible on the invoice: it surfaces as the small errors, the re-asked questions and the landlord who says the service has gone off lately.

What dedicated should mean, contractually

• A name in the engagement letter, not a service level. You should know who works for you the way you know your own staff.
• Exclusivity stated: one firm per administrator, so your busiest afternoon is never someone else’s too.
• Employment, not freelancing: the person is an employee of the provider, on local law and proper terms, because churn follows precarity and continuity is the product.
• A succession clause: what happens when the person is promoted, or leaves — notice to you, an overlap period, a documented handover using the procedure built at the start.
• The right to interview: if you cannot meet the person before they start, the provider is not selling a person.

Ask any provider on your shortlist to put those five in writing, including us. The pool operators cannot, because their economics depend on not committing a name. That is not a moral failing; it is a different product. The failing is only in selling one while describing the other.

Our own answers are the ones you would expect from the firm writing this note: named administrators, employed here, one firm each, met before they start, with succession written into the engagement. We built the model this way because the alternative is cheaper to run and worse to rely on — and because the question in the title is the one we would ask first as a buyer.

Ejas Deane is a partner of the firm. He answers enquiries himself.