“Save 5 to 10 hours a week” is the kind of claim that deserves a follow-up question. Whose hours, doing what, and how do you know.
We have run the exercise enough times now to answer it specifically. In a business of 5 to 100 people, the recovered time comes from four places, and it is rarely spread evenly across a team. One or two people are usually carrying most of it.
1. Writing the same thing again
Quotes, proposals, listing copy, job posts, weekly updates, handover notes, the email that explains your policy for the fourth time this month.
This is the largest single bucket and it is usually 3 to 6 hours a week for whoever owns it. It is also the easiest to work on, because the raw material already exists. Most businesses have twenty good examples of the thing sitting in a sent folder.
The trick is not asking a tool to write it from nothing. It is giving it your best three examples and your actual inputs, then editing what comes back. First drafts, not final ones.
2. Reading things nobody has time to read
Voicemail, long email threads, meeting recordings, supplier terms, the 40-page report the association sent.
Call it 1 to 3 hours. The gain here is less about speed and more about the reading that was not happening at all. A summary of the thread you were going to skip is worth more than a faster version of the thread you were going to read anyway.
3. Getting information out of the wrong shape
Receipts into a spreadsheet. A PDF export into your accounting categories. Fourteen inspection notes into one summary. Handwritten job cards into anything at all.
This is 1 to 4 hours, and it is concentrated on one person, usually in admin, usually on a Friday. It is also the bucket where the review step matters most, because a confident wrong number is worse than a slow right one.
4. Screening
Applications, quote requests, inbound leads, warranty claims. Anything where 30 things arrive and 6 of them need a person.
Half an hour to two hours, and the value is not really the time. It is that the six get looked at properly instead of on a Thursday at 5pm.
What this means for where you start
Add up your own four. If one of them is clearly larger, start there, and start with the person carrying it rather than the team as a whole. One workflow that gives one person four hours back is a better first result than four workflows that give everyone twenty minutes, because the person with four hours will tell everyone else.
And be careful with the total. If the arithmetic says a 30-person company recovers 200 hours a month, that is 200 hours spread across 30 people who will spend some of it on work that was already waiting. The hours are real. What you do with them is a separate decision, and it is the one worth having a plan for.