Sabeer Nelli Urges Founders to Fix Processes Before Delegating Them

Zil Money founder and CEO says businesses should examine repetitive and inefficient workflows before adding headcount to manage them

TYLER, Texas, Aug. 24, 2026 -- Sabeer Nelli, founder and CEO of Zil Money, is urging founders to examine whether an overloaded workflow should first be simplified or automated before assigning it to a new employee.

Nelli's argument is not that every business process should be automated. Instead, he believes hiring should not become a substitute for fixing work that is repetitive, unclear or dependent on inefficient manual steps.

Research supports a narrower version of that idea. A field experiment published in Management Science studied 38 supermarket cashiers handling more than 152,000 transactions across four stores. Over 38 experimental days, researchers rotated cashiers between traditional checkout work and a redesigned process in which payment collection was handled separately through self-pay kiosks. Cashiers scanned items more than 10% faster when they no longer handled the payment task.

The study was conducted within one supermarket group in Singapore, so its findings should not be generalized to every job or industry. It does, however, illustrate how automating one part of a workflow can allow employees to concentrate on the work that remains.

"If a process is broken, adding a person to run it does not fix the process, it just gives the mess a new owner," Nelli says. "Founders should ask what can be automated first, then hire for what is left."

Nelli points to repetitive, rules-based activities such as data entry, invoice matching and approval routing as examples of work businesses can evaluate for automation. In his view, removing avoidable manual steps before assigning responsibility for a workflow can help define more clearly which parts of the job actually require human judgment.

He also argues that process design matters during onboarding. When a new employee inherits undocumented shortcuts, backlogs and unclear handoffs, Nelli believes the employee may have to spend significant time understanding the workaround before being able to improve the underlying operation.

That distinction is particularly relevant in finance and operations, he says, where repetitive transactions and exception handling often exist side by side. His preferred approach is to examine which routine steps can be standardized or automated while leaving decisions, exceptions and judgment-intensive work with people.

Nelli does not view automation as a replacement for hiring. Rather, he sees it as part of deciding what a new role should be responsible for.

As automation tools become more accessible to smaller companies, Nelli expects more founders to include workflow design and automation reviews in headcount planning instead of waiting until an overloaded process has already become someone's full-time responsibility.

About Sabeer Nelli

Sabeer Nelli is the founder and CEO of Zil Money. He is an entrepreneur with experience in financial technology and business operations.

Contact

Sabeer Nelli website

Sabeer Nelli on LinkedIn

COMTEX_491407797/2891/2026-08-25T08:30:15

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