There is a job that almost every small firm needs and almost no small firm has. It has no standard title, so nobody goes looking for it. Owners feel the absence as a vague sense that things are slipping, and they blame themselves.
I recorded a podcast episode with Sarah Persich about this. She has a name for the role. She calls herself a fractional integrator.
Where the name comes from
The term comes from Gino Wickman’s book Traction, which lays out the Entrepreneurial Operating System. In that framework, every company has a visionary — usually the owner. Big picture, goal oriented, drawn to shiny objects. Every new tool looks like the answer.
The integrator is the person who brings it back to earth. Who asks how this would work with the team you have. Who decides what happens on Monday morning.
Sarah does that job for several firms at once, which is what makes it fractional. A firm with ten lawyers or more can hire someone full time. Below that, you cannot justify the salary, so the role simply goes unfilled and the owner tries to do it between client matters.
What it looks like in practice
Sarah came up through a law firm. She learned the case management systems because the firm kept switching them and somebody had to make each one work. That is a different education than a consultant gets from the outside.
So when a lawyer comes to her with a request, she does not simply fill the order. When I hired her, I came in with a narrow ask about Zapier. She started asking why. Why do you do it this way, and what is this connected to, and what happens after.
She says the same thing happens with the firms she works with now. Somebody wants two tools connected. She digs in, and it turns out the problem is not an automation problem. The process underneath it is broken. Automating it would only make the mess run faster.
Why this matters more now, not less
You might assume AI reduces the need for this role. It does the opposite.
The tools are now good enough that the hard part is no longer building the machine. The hard part is deciding what the machine should do. That decision requires someone who has seen inside a working firm, understands what the team can absorb, and can train people through a change without the whole staff losing patience.
That last part is the piece owners rarely have the appetite for. Training your own team on a new system is slow, repetitive work. It is also the difference between a tool that gets used and a tool that gets abandoned in the second week.
Nobody hires for a job they cannot name
This is the practical problem with an unnamed role. You cannot post it, search for it, or ask a colleague for a referral, because you have no words for what you want.
So name it. You are looking for a fractional integrator: someone who will look at how your firm runs, find the places where work falls through, and then fix the process before touching the software.
The next step
If you want to talk to Sarah, her site is automationlady.com and her email is hello@automationlady.com. The first strategy call is free and runs about an hour. I went through it before I hired her, and I got real value out of that hour alone.
I will say the same thing to you that I said to her on the recording. That call will not stay free forever, and one person can only serve so many firms at once.
;-)
Ernie
P.S. The full conversation with Sarah is on the 80/20 Principle Podcast. We also spend the back half of it on the AI tool that changed how she works — I wrote about that separately.
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https://ernietheattorney.net/