If you want to grow your business, you need help: no small business becomes bigger by doing it alone. According to the book “Hire Your First Employee” by Rhonda Abrams, “Hiring allows you to focus on the work you do best, manage more customers, counter your weaknesses, increase your sales, and create a business you may be able to sell some day”.
Making the decision to expand and hire employees can be overwhelming – you probably have a lot of questions. The hardest part for any business owner is figuring out what position to hire for and how to afford it! 
The first step is to decide what role you want to fill. Is it a sales role, customer service or production?
Ask yourself the following questions:
- What non-productive tasks do you spend most of your time on that you could easily delegate?
- What areas are you weakest at? Are you too busy to give your customers the level of service they deserve? If so, hire a customer service representative. Are you always lagging behind on production? Then hire someone to handle that. Maybe you’re great at customer service or production, but not sales. Hire a salesperson. Or you’re great at sales but you’re so bogged down in the day-to-day tasks of running your business that you just don’t have time. That’s the perfect reason to hire an administrative assistant, office manager or marketing coordinator.
Next, decide how much help you can afford. Take a look at your cash flow and your monthly profits. Are you making enough to support an employee(s)? If so, can you support full time or part time? How much will you pay your employee? Resources like Glassdoor.com and Salary.com are great for researching regional salary ranges for any position. And don’t forget to include the cost of taxes and benefits in the equation.
Another consideration is your Return on Investment (ROI) on the employee – how much additional revenue do you expect to earn by adding this position to your company? Will it pay for itself? If so, how long will it take? Six months? A year? Two years? This is an important consideration to plan for.
Once you’ve decided to hire an employee, the role(s) you want to fill and how much you can afford be sure to consult with an HR professional or attorney to gain a basic understanding of labor laws and how they affect you.
