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Blog: The Organized Entrepreneur
 When it's time to hire . . .
As a business starts to grow, there inevitably comes a time that the entrepreneur can no longer do everything alone. For my business, that time came this past week.
Entrepreneurs tend to be reluctant to hire. This happens for several reasons ranging from the expense and stress of trying to make payroll to fear of losing control over the quality of their product or service. Also, many entrepreneurs start their own businesses because they either enjoy working alone or found themselves not well suited to supervisory positions in large corporations.
No matter how you became a "solopreneur", the fact is that it takes more than one person to run a rapidly growing business. If you can relate to one of the following statements, your business may have reached this critical point:
· I used to be so organized . . .
· Great customer service is how I differentiate myself, but I am too busy to maintain a personal relationship with each client.
· Where did all these piles of paper come from?
· I used to spend all day interacting with my clients, but now just running the office takes most of my time.
· Uh oh – Did I remember to fill that order?
If you recognized yourself in any of these statements, you may have outgrown "going it alone".
Like me, you may fear that adding staff will disrupt your current systems and throw your business into a state of chaos. Also, you may fear that employees will increase your cost without a corresponding increase in revenue. Unfortunately, without proper advance planning, all of these things could be true. However, with a little planning and forethought, these problems can be avoided.
For the next few weeks, I will be blogging on my own experience with staffing and sharing the strategies and solutions that are working for my business. For today, I will focus on payroll and compensation issues. I have put off the decision to hire for over 6 months because I did not want to take on the added burden of managing payroll. I estimated that it would take an average of 2 hours per month just to handle all of the administrative and regulatory requirements related to having employees. The last thing I needed was another deadline, another report to file, etc.
I hired a local payroll processing company to handle this for me. The large, national payroll companies frequently have a minimum size requirement for new clients, but the local company is willing to serve small companies and the customer service has been amazing. Sounds expensive, doesn't it? Their monthly fees are going to equal about 1.5 hours of my time at my standard billing rate while saving me 2 hours of administrative time.
Check back in next Saturday to see what lessons were learned in my first full week of having an employee.
posted on: 11/10/2007 8:30:00 AM by Shana Prichard
category: Business
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The Organized Entrepreneur
by Shana Prichard
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About Shana:
Shana M. Prichard, MBA owns realign, llc, a professional organizing firm. realign, llc provides small business organizing services including filing system design/implementation, desk and time management and QuickBooks set up and training. realign, llc also provides home-office organizing services to individuals.
Shana's Website:
www.RealignOrganizing.com
What I'm Reading . . .
- "Raising Financially Fit Kids", Joline Godfrey
Common sense ideas and insight into raising kids who are wll-prepared to manage their own finances as young adults.
- "The Success Principles: How To Get From Where You Are to Where You Want To Be" by Jack Canfield
This book really got me excited about pursuing my goals and growing my business. There is a heavier emphasis on materialism than what I am comfortable with, but overall this is an inspiring book.
- "The Organized Executive", by Stephanie Winston
- "No B.S. Time Management for Enterpreneurs" by Dan Kennedy
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