Getting help: your first hire

One pair of hands has a ceiling. When you are turning work away, working seven days, or doing jobs badly because you are rushing, you have hit it.

Getting past that ceiling is a skill of its own, and doing it badly costs more than staying small. Plenty of one-person businesses have been killed by a first hire.

Before you hire anyone

Three things have to be true, and if they are not, fix them first:

1. You know who your customers are — the list from "Nothing falls through." If your customers live in your head and your phone, a second person cannot serve them. This is usually the real reason someone feels stuck.
2. The work is written down. If the only place the job exists is your hands, whoever you hire will do it their way, and your customers will notice.
3. The numbers work with a second person in them. If a job pays you $80 and takes three hours, and you pay someone $20 an hour, you have $20 left before supplies. Do that arithmetic before you promise anybody anything.

Start smaller than a job

Your first help does not have to be an employee. In order of least risk:

• One job, one person, one day. Pay them for the day. See what happens.
• The parts that are not the skill — loading, cleanup, driving, the phone. Often two hours of this a week gives you back a whole job.
• Regular part-time, once you know the work is steady.

Most people jump straight to the last one and then panic when a slow month comes.

Agree it in writing

Not a contract from a lawyer. A page, or even a text message you both keep:

• What they do
• What you pay, per hour or per job
• When you pay — a real day, and never later than you said
• Who supplies what
• What happens if they cannot come

Writing it down is not distrust. It is what keeps a good relationship good when something goes wrong, and something will.

There are real rules about employees versus contractors, taxes, and insurance. Those are questions for an accountant, not for this guide and not for the coach — and they are worth one appointment before you make anyone regular.

Make their work look like yours

Write the checklist for a job. The actual steps, in order, the way you do it. Give it to them and do the first one alongside them.

Then check the second one and the fifth one. Your name is on the work whether you were there or not, and a customer who gets a worse job the second time does not blame your helper.

Know what a job costs now

Every job now costs you what you pay them plus supplies. Work out what is left on each of your services with a helper on it. You may find one of your services does not survive a second pair of hands — that is not a reason to give up on help, it is a reason to raise that price.

In the portal

Tell the coach what you pay, what a job pays, and how long it takes. It will do the arithmetic with you and tell you plainly whether it works — and it will say so if it does not.

To reach this milestone

• My customers are in a list, not in my head.
• I wrote down the steps of a job so someone else could follow them.
• I worked out what is left on a job after I pay a helper and buy supplies.
• Someone other than me has done paid work for a customer.
• We agreed in writing what they get paid and when, and I paid them on time.