The house was supposed to be the reward

A home running six to ten people is an operation. An operation without a manager runs on whoever is least able to say no.

Count the people a large household actually employs. A maid. A cook. A driver. A nanny. A gardener. A tutor. The plumber who only answers on Tuesdays and the electrician who answers not at all. Six to ten of them, on rotating hours, with wages, holidays, absences and disputes.

That is an operation. Nobody calls it one, because it happens at home and the people in it are called help rather than staff. Every feature of a small business is there: hiring, scheduling, payroll, quality, and the daily judgement about what gets done first when two things cannot both happen.

An operation without a manager does not run itself. It runs on whoever in the family is least able to say no. Usually that is the woman of the house, unpaid, on top of a career, a marriage and children. The house was supposed to be the reward. It became the second job.

The instinct when it strains is to hire more. More help, more hours, more people to be coordinated. That makes the problem worse rather than better, because coordination is the actual work and it has just been handed more inputs.

What the household needs is not another pair of hands. It needs one person accountable for the whole of it, holding the roster, the vendors, the school run, the elders' appointments, the travel and the standard, and answering for all of it in one place.

That is what the management fee buys. The household's own expenses stay the household's. What I am paid for is the judgement, the calendar, and the fact that when something fails there is exactly one person to ask.

The measure of it working is quiet. Nobody in the family should be able to tell you what happened on Tuesday, because nothing did.