The G&A Tax: How Admin Slows Science
At a 50-person biotech, roughly 15-20 people are doing the scientific and clinical work that directly advances the pipeline. The remaining 30-35 people support the operation — finance, legal, HR, facilities, contracts, compliance. This ratio is normal and necessary.
What's less often examined is the tax that administrative work imposes on the 15-20 people doing the science. Scientists and clinicians at small biotechs spend far more time on administrative tasks than their titles suggest.
Where the tax appears
Contract review and routing. A Principal Investigator co-authoring a CRO agreement gets two rounds of review requests, three signature ceremonies, and six email chains. A bench scientist ordering a new vendor service generates a purchasing process that takes three weeks. These interruptions compound.
Grant and funding research. Scientists are often the best-positioned people to identify relevant funding opportunities and write the scientific sections. But searching for grants, managing the application process, and tracking submission deadlines takes time that could be in the lab.
Regulatory documentation support. In regulatory submissions, scientists provide inputs to dozens of sections — study rationale, data interpretation, method descriptions. The process of getting those inputs, integrated into documents, reviewed, and approved is coordination overhead that falls partly on scientific staff.
Internal reporting and communications. Board update preparation, investor deck contributions, scientific advisory board materials. At a small biotech, these often involve the same five scientists who are also running experiments.
The compounding effect
The G&A tax is not just about hours. It's about context switching. A scientist who spends two hours in the middle of an experiment day on administrative tasks doesn't lose two hours — they lose the experiment day. The cognitive cost of context switching in complex scientific work is well-documented and routinely underestimated.
The case for G&A automation is not just efficiency. It's protecting scientific focus.