Trying to Get That First Employee (take one)

Trying to Get That First Employee (take one)

- Lessons Learned

As with any successful business, you get too busy to do it all yourself. And no matter how you slice it, the move from one person to two is a major opportunity for learning things. At this point in the business, almost any business owner will have been an employee of someone, somewhere. But the lessons around hiring your own employees seem completely unrelated to other companies.

My path to a first employee begins the same as almost everyone: I had too much work for me to do, so I hired someone to do the same thing I was doing. This is a mistake in almost every case, including mine. I had already read The E-myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, but I hadn't understood why this was a mistake. I was acting like a technician who needed another technician. 

This was a mistake because I should have hired an administrative assistant and NOT a technician. As my work expanded, I hadn't noticed that my overload came from things that were not technical. I didn't really need a technician: I needed to hand off invoicing, paperwork, some marketing chores, and lots of other work that was non-technical.

If I could go back and revisit one critical early decision, it would be to hire an administrative assistant at $10/hr (at the time) who could free up lots of my time so I could go do the work that was bringing in $100/hour. Here's what I did instead.

After I decided that I needed a tech, I promptly made a second mistake. I assumed that I needed to hire someone fulltime. Even then, I knew that I needed help to complete the work, but I also knew that I didn't have enough work to keep two people business full time. My justification was that I would sell like crazy to get the additional work.

Reality check: Even though I hired a great technician, he still needed to be introduced to my clients, my products and services, and my procedures. So now I was crazy busy doing all the work and not really handing off very much. Plus, of course, I was still doing all the non-technical work.

Eventually, Paul was trained up enough that he could work unsupervised most of the time. He has a great customer service attitude and clients loved him. I filled every available minute doing SALES in order to fulfill the promise (lie) I'd told myself that I could play catch-up and create enough work to pay him and myself fulltime salaries.

I was basically working fulltime to pay his wages and not making money for myself. That was unsustainable.

This was a frustrating period of extreme over-work. We did get new clients from my massive push. But let's be realistic. It takes a lot of labor sales to pay for a fulltime employee with benefits. 

In the end, I could not sustain it. I had to sit down with Paul and push the reset button. I was heartbroken. I had miscalculated many things simply because my "big business" background had done almost nothing to prepare me for the realities of small business employee management.

Remember, also, that this was well before the concepts of managed services and flat fee maintenance contracts. In the world of break/fix, you eat what you kill. And if you don't kill anything, you don't eat. That's bad enough when you're a one-person shop. It's worse when you've made promises to someone and he's relying on you to provide the money he needs to feed his family.

I might make this sound a bit too dramatic, but that's the way it felt inside my head. I had made promises to Paul. And he had assumed I would be able to pay the salary agreed on.

We ended up re-negotiating and he became a part-time employee. Of course, he really needed a fulltime job. Eventually, he left and took a great job that he enjoyed for more than twenty years. I had only part-time employees for almost five years after that. Hence the "Take One" in the title of this post. 

I had learned a hard lesson, both financially and emotionally. I was committed that we would grow, we would take on more people, and we would pay them real, fulltime wages they could rely on. But I'd been bit hard and I needed to regroup and have a plan.

Eventually, I did figure things out. Eight years after Paul left, we had fifteen people employed across two companies I owned, and payroll was the least of our worries.

For folks starting out, or looking to "finally" make the move from one employee to two, I would give three big pieces of advice:

1) Hire an admin or office manager first and NOT a technician. Really. Honestly. Just do it.

2) Your first technician employee (which is to say, your second employee) should be hired on a part-time, hourly basis. This gives you maximum flexibility on many variables.

3) Have a plan. And if you need help creating a plan, find a coach or a community or a peer group. 

As with all challenges in business, millions of people have done this before. Put you ego on the shelf and ask for help. It's amazing how many wonderful, helpful people you will find. You really can do it. But you don't have to do it alone.

All comments welcome.

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Episode 21

This Episode is part of the ongoing Lessons Learned series. For all the information, and an index of Lessons Learned episodes, go to the Lessons Learned Page. 

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