Strata AI vs. Hiring Another Assistant: The Math

The True Cost of a New Hire

When advisors think about hiring, they usually think about salary. But salary is just the beginning. A competent administrative assistant in financial services costs $45,000 to $65,000 in base salary, depending on your market. Add employer taxes, benefits, office space, equipment, and software licenses, and you're looking at $65,000 to $95,000 in fully loaded cost per year.

Then there's the hidden cost: your time. Training a new hire takes 3 to 6 months before they're truly productive. During that period, you're spending 5 to 10 hours per week on oversight, correction, and coaching. That's your most expensive time being spent on someone else's learning curve.

And there's the risk factor. Turnover in administrative roles averages 25% annually. If your assistant leaves after 18 months, you're back to square one — recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, training — while your clients feel the disruption.

What Strata AI Actually Replaces

Strata doesn't replace your team. It replaces the repetitive, time-consuming tasks that eat into everyone's day. Morning briefs that used to take 45 minutes of research and formatting? Automated. Meeting notes that required someone to sit in on calls and type furiously? Captured and structured automatically. Follow-up emails that needed drafting, review, and compliance checking? Generated in seconds.

The average advisory team spends 12 to 15 hours per week on tasks that Strata handles automatically. That's the equivalent of a part-time employee's entire workload — except Strata does it instantly, consistently, and without calling in sick.

The Numbers Side by Side

Let's compare directly. A new administrative hire costs $65,000 to $95,000 per year, takes 3 to 6 months to become productive, works 40 hours per week (minus vacation, sick days, and breaks), and introduces turnover risk. Strata AI costs $2,940 to $7,140 per year depending on your plan, is productive from day one, works 24/7 without breaks, and never quits.

That's a 10x to 30x cost difference for the specific tasks Strata handles. And unlike a hire, Strata scales with your practice without incremental cost. Whether you have 50 clients or 500, the platform handles the same workload at the same price.

Where Humans Still Win

This isn't an argument against hiring people. There are things that require human judgment, empathy, and relationship-building that no AI can replicate. Complex financial planning conversations, navigating family dynamics around wealth transfer, calming a nervous client during a market downturn — these are irreplaceable human skills.

The argument is about allocation. Your team's human hours should be spent on high-value, relationship-driven work. The admin work — the note-taking, the email drafting, the data entry, the statement parsing — should be automated so your people can focus on what they do best.

The Compound Effect

Here's what most advisors miss: the value isn't just in cost savings. It's in what you do with the recovered time. If Strata saves your team 12 hours per week, that's 12 hours that can go toward deepening client relationships, pursuing new business, or simply avoiding burnout.

One advisor using Strata reported that the time saved on morning prep alone allowed them to add 15 client check-in calls per week. Within six months, their retention rate improved by 8% and they received 12 new referrals — directly attributable to the increased touchpoints that Strata made possible.

The Right Question

The question isn't "Should I use AI or hire a person?" The right question is: "What should my people be spending their time on?" If the answer is "more client-facing work, more relationship building, more strategic thinking," then the admin work needs to go somewhere. Strata is that somewhere.

Start with a 7-day risk-free period. See how much time your team gets back. Then decide whether that next hire should be another admin — or another advisor.