If you have not already read the first post in this series, I encourage you to take a minute or two to do that. Today I would like to talk a little bit about hiring help. I hear and read so often about the LONG hours small business owners put into their business day after day, all too often to the point of complete burnout. I also hear from those same people that either they cannot afford to hire help or cannot find someone to do the same job they can. I would like to address both of those and I will start with the latter.
If you are reading this post as a small business owner, you already know there are so many aspects to running a small business, some of which are no fun at all. What are the tasks in your business that you dislike? Paying bills? Sending invoices? Shopping for your inventory or office supplies? Organizing your files? These are all things that a part time person can do for you, either as an employee, or as a contractor.
Barbara Sanfilippo spoke at a conference I attended last year and had a fantastic idea. Even if you LOVE every aspect of your business, there are probably things in your personal life that you dislike that takes up time you could be spending on your business. Barbara absolutely despised grocery shopping and taking and picking up dry cleaning, so she paid someone to do those things for her, freeing up time to do the things she enjoyed.
Now on to affordability. You will be amazed at the responses you will receive if you place an ad on craigslist for a $10-$12 per hour job. I am guessing that most likely as a small business owner, you charge a much higher rate than $10-$12 per hour. If you free up your time from doing some of the smaller, yet time consuming tasks, you can spend more time doing the things that make more money for your business. Say for example, you charge $35 per hour and you spend 10 hours per week doing tasks that someone else can do for $10 per hour. Those extra 10 hours would net you $250 ($350-$100) and you will be doing the things you enjoy. I think if you do the math for your business, and take into consideration your sanity, you will find it worthwhile.
