Hiring your first employee is exciting and scary at the same time. You may be worried if you can afford it, you’re not sure what to hand off and if there’s enough work for an employee, and if you’re really honest with yourself, you’re worried about what that new employee will think of you and your business. So instead, you postpone hiring and just keep doing it all yourself. But there’s a cost.

If you’ve been on the fence about hiring for awhile but the data points to hiring, decide what your fear is about and address that. Next step is to define what the person will do. This is where many small business owners stop: they say “it’s a little of this, a little of that” or think they can probably do it better themselves. If you make the right hire, they will be phenomenally better than you! Make a list of everything you do during the course of a day or week; those tasks that aren’t part of your unique abilities can be handed off to an employee. Group the tasks to be handed off into general categories, such as marketing, bookkeeping, or customer care. What attributes and skills are a “must have”? I encourage you to have them complete a behavior profile, such as DISC or Kolbe. Both of these will tell you, for example, if the candidate is detail-oriented or a risk taker.

Yes, your first hire is an additional cost to your business, but look at the upside. What can you do with the time you free up? If you’re a professional who is booking appointments several weeks out, tasks now performed by an employee allow you to schedule more appointments, which equal revenue.  That revenue should be several times the hourly rate of your new employee. If the demand is not quite there, make a list of how you will spend your newly found time building interest that becomes revenue.

- Helen Dutton, Business Coach