There is something you MUST do before you hire your first or next employee. It’s essential to your survival. It’s the most powerful, effective, and efficient approach to making your next hire successful. Keep reading.
Running your business by yourself—without employees—is like living in a state of nirvana (the Buddhist kind, not the band kind). (That might be an overstatement, but they say I should start with a strong opening sentence.)
Of course, you won’t recognize you were once in nirvana until you have lots of employees and are miserable. You’ll hire people anyway. I accept that I can’t stop you from hiring people. It’s Destiny (another heavy metal band). It’s Fate (also a heavy metal band). It’s what you are going to do regardless of what I advise.
For some reason, hiring people is on the major life achievements list for most lawyers.
Whatevsies.
You’re going to do whatever you’re going to do. You can’t be stopped. You know it, and I know it. It’s going to happen, so let’s just accept that you’re going to ruin your perfect life by hiring “help.”
Set Yourself Up for Success in Hiring
We’ve talked about when you can economically justify hiring help. I’ve written about it here, here, and here. In case you’re too tired to click, the magic number is $25,000 in monthly revenue. Also, if you’re wondering how I keep coming up with new stuff for this site, then now you know how I do it: I don’t. (See, I’ve written the same article in three different ways. Of course, I’m still getting the question from readers, so I repeat myself because the need never goes away.)
However, today I have something kind of new to say.
I’m saying this because lots of folks are going to ignore (and have already ignored) my advice on growing your revenue before you start spending it on employees. If you’re going to hire prematurely and disrupt nirvana, then you might as well do it in the best way possible, right?
Here’s the deal. If you’re going to hire before the economics make sense, you need to do two things:
- Talk yourself into it. Come up with some crazy rationalization about how your business is different/special/unique and explain to yourself why meeting your emotional need to manage an employee ranks higher than your financial need to earn an income.
- Build systems. Don’t hire anyone until you’ve documented the pertinent systems the employee will use. You need to create documentation for each and every element of the job before you hire the employee. You’ll use these system documents to train the new employee. See how that works?
The systems are the key to making new hires effective. There’s nothing worse than hiring people, paying them to do work you have time to do, and then having them mess it up because you haven’t trained them and given them the resources required for them to do things right.
You see, if you hire people you didn’t really need and they then mess up the stuff you could have done yourself, you’re actually moving backward, not forward. You hired them because you believed you needed help, but somehow your new hires result in your needing more help.
This would never happen, right? Um, actually it happens all the time. The way to avoid this scenario is to prepare well-documented systems. That’s your best shot at making a bad decision work out for the best.
The systems are an essential element of moving forward, regardless of whether the employee is full-time, part-time, temporary, virtual, or some homeless person working for your lunch leftovers. If you want your employees to do stuff right and save you time while doing it, then you need documented systems.
Document your systems, okay?
Please, please, please don’t ignore the systems advice when you’re ignoring the “don’t hire until…” advice. Build the systems. We use SweetProcess (reviewed here), and it’ll give you an extended free trial (mentioned in the review). You can document the systems anywhere you like. The key is to create the process and write it down.
