Hire Your First Employee. Rhonda Abrams
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—BABE RUTH
You know you need help, and you’re ready to take the step to hiring someone. Whoa! Before you run your first help wanted ad, you need to figure out a few things: what will your employee be doing, where will you put them, and can you afford to pay them and still have money to pay all your other bills and yourself too?
Doing a bit of background work prepares you for the process of finding and hiring a great employee. You’ll find you’re much more confident about every aspect of becoming a boss when you’re sure about what you need an employee to do, you’ve determined that you can afford to hire them, and you’ve considered the basic logistics of having someone else around to share the day-to-day responsibilities of your business.
What Role for Your New Hire?
First things first: What, exactly, do you need an employee to do? Clarifying—at first for yourself and later for your employee—the tasks and responsibilities you’ll want them to tackle sets the foundation for a job description you’ll develop soon (see Chapter 9 on Finding Applicants).
But before you can do that, on a simpler level, you have to spend some time identifying your goals and envisioning your new employee’s role and responsibilities. What will they work on? What tasks do you most want them to accomplish? How will they help your business succeed and grow? The more clearly you define the work you want them to do and the role you envision them filling, the more likely you are to find a candidate who’s an appropriate fit for your needs.
One of the most important things to examine is which roles you want to keep for yourself and which you’d rather assign to others. Which items on your crowded plate should you delegate to an employee and which do you want or need to keep yourself?
Let’s say you own a one-person hair salon, and you’re fully booked with appointments. But you’re frazzled. You have to carve time out of your day for scheduling, ordering supplies, and shampooing customers.
You’re ready for growth and you have a couple options regarding what type of employee to hire:
1. A receptionist/assistant. Someone to do the support work allows you to concentrate on customers and earn more per hour on doing what you love—styling hair. They can answer the phone, shampoo waiting customers, clean and order supplies. The downside: they don’t bring in direct, additional income.
2. A second hairdresser. They’ll bring in new customers, more income, and help your top line to grow. The downside: they don’t free you up from the stuff you don’t like to do. In fact, you may spend more time answering phones.
Most businesspeople face similar dilemmas when choosing what type of employee to hire. The choices frequently boil down to: hiring someone to help you take care of administrative or basic operations of your business, freeing your time for more lucrative activities OR hiring a salesperson to bring in more customers OR adding someone who does the same/similar tasks as you and who’ll, hopefully, bring in more money.
Of course, for certain types of businesses, the kinds of employees you’ll need will be fairly obvious. Starting a restaurant, for example, you know you need a chef/cook, wait staff, and bussers. You may need a host or cashier. But even then, you’ll want to take a look at which of these jobs—if any—you’ll choose to perform yourself and which you’ll hire others to do. Perhaps you want to be the cook or the host. It’s a good idea to sit down and figure out which jobs you want.
Typically, for most small businesses, the first hires fall into one of these categories:
Use the worksheet “Business Tasks” to brainstorm about the jobs you need done in your business. You will likely produce a fairly long list. Don’t worry. After compiling your list, indicate whether you want to keep these tasks for yourself, hand them over to someone else, or share these duties. This will start to give you an idea of the jobs you’d like to hire others to complete.
As you jot down your ideas, be aware of the two biggest mistakes business owners make when hiring an employee:
1. Handing over too much authority
2. Not giving over any authority
Recognize that you have to relinquish some control if you want your business to grow, and your employee to be effective and satisfied.
You’re almost certain to have a long, long list of things you’d like someone else to do. Prioritize what you’d like accomplished.
Can they all be undertaken by the same person? In a small business, it’s typical for people to wear many hats, but you still have to consider whether one real-live person can manage very different tasks. For instance, is it realistic to imagine that the person who handles your administrative paperwork can also do some basic bookkeeping, shipping, and some basic work on your website? Probably. But is it realistic to think the person who’s going to handle your administrative tasks can also manage your computer network, handle your back-end technology needs, and make sales calls? Probably not.
worksheet: Business Tasks
List—as much as possible—the tasks you need done in your business. Identify which ones you want to keep entirely for yourself, which you’d like to hand over to an employee (or other help) and which tasks you’ll share.
Also, don’t be surprised if you end up in a different place than you expected. Maybe at first you just knew you needed a sales person only to discover that an administrative assistant makes more sense.
Use the Worksheet, “Employee Tasks” to list the kinds of jobs you want your new employee to handle, what background they need to accomplish those tasks, and how many hours a week you expect them to devote to those tasks.
Help Wanted, But How Much?
Now that you’ve decided what position you should fill first, you need to consider how much time you’ll require from an employee. Do you need a full-time worker? A part-timer? A contractor or consultant? Based on your job requirements—and your budget—consider the range of your options for getting the help you need: