The Boss of You

As a fol­low up to Should I hire some­one Part 1, I’d like to share with you a bit of wis­dom that seemed to escape my own men­tal grasp when we looked at hir­ing some­one the first time. I’ll admit I was over­worked and way past over­tired at the time, so it’s not too sur­pris­ing that I totally missed the boat on this one. At least that’s my story and I’m stick­ing to it.

Here’s the thing I man­aged to more or less clue out about when hir­ing some­one: they do work. Who knew!?

If you set things up right, they should prob­a­bly be doing bill­able work ie/ work that in some way directly helps you make more money. When we hired our first staff per­son we made sure the posi­tion was for some­one who would do a lot of direct client bill­able hours. And, lo and behold as a con­se­quence hav­ing a third per­son around we were actu­ally able to do more bill­able work through the com­pany. Rocket sci­ence I know. But seri­ously, when we first con­sid­ered hir­ing all I saw in my head was some­one who needed to be paid and man­aged, I didn’t see some­one who would help bring their own pay­cheque in the door. As an almost imme­di­ate con­se­quence of hav­ing a third hand on staff (or really a fifth and sixth hand on staff, but you get my drift) we were able to move through projects more quickly, keep on top of requests faster and things just kept flow­ing from there. As a result meet­ing the new larger monthly pay­roll wasn’t too challenging.

As I say, this all may seem pretty ele­men­tary to smar­ty­pants like your­selves, but I swear to you it was like the clouds parted and sun­shine bathed my oxy­gen starved brain. About two weeks into Chris (our employee) start­ing with us I remem­ber sit­ting in the office on a Fri­day after­noon and say­ing to Lau­ren “It’s so great hav­ing him here! He does stuff! Stuff that I don’t have to do any­more! And now, like magic, I have time to do more stuff!” And true to form he’s con­tin­ued to do stuff, do it well and bring all kinds of valu­able new skills and resources to our company.

Now ours is a ser­vice model and I know things are very dif­fer­ent for retail busi­ness own­ers, though I imag­ine some­what sim­i­lar for man­u­fac­tur­ing. Can those of you with other types of busi­nesses share any wis­dom on the pluses and minuses of tak­ing on staff?