MAY 2008
Emira here guest posting at Another Girl at Play where I'm positively thrilled to be ending a four-part blog tour that my co-author (Lauren Bacon) and I have been doing in support of our just released business book for women The Boss of You. (To read the previous three posts, visit Anti9to5Guide.com, FeliciaSullivan.com and AllThingGirl.net). Why the excitement? Lauren and I first met Alex when she interviewed us for this site many, many years ago and we were honoured at that time to be included in the company of such awesome and inspiring women. Our book is a business book aimed at women just like those you find at this site: creative, smart women who dream of turning their passion into a self-sustaining career. It's wonderful to be back on this site, in the company of these women again all these many years later, so a big thanks to Alex for inviting us back.
Now, onto the topic at hand: our blog book tour has been focused around the idea of hiring your first employee(s) as a business owner. (We've devoted a whole chapter to this in our book, so if you're still thirsting for more, do pick up a copy.) Today I'm going to talk about how you keep an eye on the bottom line when hiring employees, that is: how do you make sure they're helping you and your business make money, afterall you want to be able to pay them at the end of the day.
When we first started thinking about hiring our first employee for our web design studio, we were really tempted to bring in someone who could do the more menial tasks in our days, leaving us with more time to handle the heavy lifting. Basically, we thought we'd get some kind of a Girl Friday, who could help out with administrivia and the like. When we floated this idea past some wise friends, who ran a PR company of a similar size to our business, and had recently hired their first employee they suggested we reconsider. "Make sure your staff person is doing billable work," they told us "otherwise, they'll never pay for themselves." Now that may seem a bit obvious on hindsight, but at the time, it was pretty novel for us. As the sole owners (and until then sole employees) of our business, we were pretty hung up on making sure that all the work that came out of our studio was up to our personal standards of excellence and getting someone else involved in producing that work seemed not only scary but darn right risky. And it was, but not as risky as bringing a third person onto the payroll who wasn't helping generate some real income for the business. With that piece of advice, we rethought things and ended up hiring someone who could help us by doing almost solely billable work, freeing us up for some of the more big picture work like thinking about marketing, client/customer relations, and putting systems in place to help our company run more smoothly now that it wasn't just the two of us.The other bonus? Work got done a lot faster, meaning we could take on more projects, finish them more quickly and keep money flowing through the company at a faster rate.
So if your running a service based company make sure your employees are doing billable work. Easy. What if you make a product? Well the same rules apply, it may just not be as cut and dried to evaluate, but basically any work that an employee can do to help you produce your product or get it into customers hands more quickly is something you want a hand with. So if that means hiring someone to help package orders so that you don't spend half your week wrapped up in envelopes and post office lineups and can get back to designing/creating more products to sell that counts. If it means hiring someone to help you out with the production end of things so that you can increase your capacity to make more products for sale, also a worthwhile paycheck to write.
We do hope that this hiring help series has been helpful for those of you who are considering starting up your own business, or who have maybe been in business for a while now and are thinking about taking the leap into hiring staff. We've tried to cover off a few angles you should consider, but you're likely to still have lots of questions, as I say, we did devote a whole chapter to this in our book and we encourage you to leave comments here or at our site if you've still got questions and we'll do our best to answer them. I also hope that those of you who have been following along on this tour may have found yourself some new resources in the sites we've been posting at, all these women -- Michelle, Felicia, Lorissa and Alex -- have plenty of wisdom to offer and we're so grateful to them for being a part of our book tour!