Are You Ready to Hire Your First Employee?

Many self-employed workers toil for months or years on their own, working to develop a business that is productive and profitable. Yet, when success finally comes, entrepreneurs need to be willing and able to hire additional staff to keep up with customer demand.

If your startup is doing well, it might be time to consider getting your business ready for your first employee. Here are a few steps you might need to take to ensure that you and your organization are prepared for a new face around the office.

Crunch the Numbers

There are many good reasons your employee might need an employee, but before you hire anyone, you need to be certain that your company can afford the extra set of hands. Though you might have happily worked for little or no wage as you built your business in the beginning, no one wants to support someone else’s dream for free. Thus, you need to be able to provide regular paychecks to your employee, and you should strive to get as close to competitive total compensation as possible.

However, while you are determining whether your business can afford a new hire, you should consider this: Your employee is likely to generate more revenue for your business. It might be worthwhile to consider metrics like average revenue per sale and average monthly sales to understand how much more a new worker could bring in. Then, you can better understand how much cash you will have available to pay your new hire.

Consider Using a Recruitment Service

Without a doubt, you want top talent helping you grow your startup to its potential. However, the job listing you post in your local paper probably is not going to garner the response you hope for. Unless you have experience in recruitment and know where to look for the best job candidates, you should consider relying on recruitment experts to help connect you with the best person for your new position.

In fact, there are a few different third-party services that can help you in your search for your very first employee. An attorney will help you understand and remain compliant to employment laws, and an accountant can double-check your calculations to ensure you will have enough money on hand to produce reliable paychecks. The more legwork you put into the hiring process from the beginning, the easier hiring more employees will be in the future.

Create the Necessary Tools and Systems

When you were only responsible for managing yourself, you could ignore many of the tools and systems of larger businesses that help coordinate the workforce. Yet, with the introduction of an employee, your business needs to put all those processes in place. Some examples of systems you should start to develop include:

• Payroll. A payroll system keeps track of your employee’s hours, disperses regular payments and withholds the right amount of money for various taxes.
• Safety. You are liable for the safety of your workforce. You should read OSHA’s guidelines that apply to your workplace and create a system of safety checks to prevent injury.
• Onboarding. How is your employee going to learn the ropes at your startup? You need an onboarding process to give your worker the knowledge and tools for mutual success.
• Performance. Organizations create performance management processes to track how employees are achieving goals and encourage high levels of productivity.

Calm Down

With your first employee, your job will shift from resourceful, intrepid, lone-wolf entrepreneur to manager — which, for many within the self-employed sphere, is a daunting development. You might have all the right skills to build a business, but becoming a business leader requires a whole new set of skills for keeping your business productive and profitable.

However, if you are overly stressed about the change to your job description, your new hire will not be able to settle into their role with success. Thus, you need to find a way to stay calm and confident during the hiring and onboarding processes. You might consider enrolling in business leadership courses to build your confidence and capability in your new role. Then again, you might utilize the free time provided by an employee to relax with family or participate in a beloved hobby.

Your first employee probably will not be your last. When your business is ready to hire an additional worker, you need to be prepared to restructure the organization to make way for a growing staff — and if you do it right, you should find new heights of success as a result.