Hire Your First Employee. Rhonda Abrams
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Название: Hire Your First Employee

Автор: Rhonda Abrams

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Поиск работы, карьера

Серия:

isbn: 9781933895697

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ to make the “mental leap” to this next stage of your business. Perhaps you’ve been a “solo-preneur,” working on your own, maybe basing your business from your home. Hiring someone will make a major change in your lifestyle as well as your business. Perhaps you’re starting the type of business that requires one or more employees right off the bat, such as a restaurant, store, or manufacturing plant. Besides building a business, you also have to build your skills as “boss”—spending part of your time managing and leading employees.

      Where do you see your business in a year? Three years? Five years? How does having employees or other workers help you achieve your goals? Think about adding employees within the context of your larger business goals.

      Use the worksheet “Goals for Growing My Business” to consider what you want your business to look like in the next few years. That gives you a context for deciding what type of employees to hire and how soon.

      The fact is, adding an employee to your business is one of the most powerful methods for bringing in more work from new and existing customers, delivering a higher level of service or giving yourself the time to brainstorm innovative new products and services. In other words, you can hire your way to growth.

      Many entrepreneurs hope that their businesses will have a positive impact on society—that their companies will not only make a profit but help to make the world a better place. They’ve identified a product or service that people need or want and hope to fill that void. Most care about their communities, the environment, helping reduce poverty. But few people talk about the tremendous positive impact that creating a good job has on society as a whole. And how satisfying it truly is—if you allow yourself to recognize the importance of creating jobs.

      The ultimate act of social responsibility is to create a job—a good job—and then to treat your employees fairly and decently. Think about this for a moment: did you ever have a job where they paid you a good, competitive wage, in a work environment where people were given respect and thanked when they did a good job? Where you had a chance to have your ideas listened to, where there was no discrimination or bias? If you did, you know what a wonderful difference it made in your life. Every day you had a chance to spend your hours in a positive environment—even if you had to work hard. If you didn’t—and most people don’t—then you can imagine how wonderful such a work environment like that would be.

      You—as an employer—have the opportunity to create that kind of situation for others. And that’s an incredibly important contribution to the world. That doesn’t mean you can’t be a demanding boss—you can indeed demand hard work and high standards. But if you can create a job, pay fair wages and benefits, respect and acknowledge your employees, and create an environment of fairness and acceptance, you can go to sleep at night—every night—knowing that you have changed the lives of others for the better. And they, in turn, will change yours.

       Specific Goals:

      Enter the number or amount you hope to achieve for your business in one year, five years, and ten years.

       Priorities:

      Rate your priorities for your business.

      chapter

      2

      Scope Out Your Specific Needs

       “The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.”

       —BABE RUTH

      You know you need help, and you’re ready to take the step to hiring someone. Whoa! Before you run your first help wanted ad, you need to figure out a few things: what will your employee be doing, where will you put them, and can you afford to pay them and still have money to pay all your other bills and yourself too?

      Doing a bit of background work prepares you for the process of finding and hiring a great employee. You’ll find you’re much more confident about every aspect of becoming a boss when you’re sure about what you need an employee to do, you’ve determined that you can afford to hire them, and you’ve considered the basic logistics of having someone else around to share the day-to-day responsibilities of your business.

      First things first: What, exactly, do you need an employee to do? Clarifying—at first for yourself and later for your employee—the tasks and responsibilities you’ll want them to tackle sets the foundation for a job description you’ll develop soon (see Chapter 9 on Finding Applicants).

      But before you can do that, on a simpler level, you have to spend some time identifying your goals and envisioning your new employee’s role and responsibilities. What will they work on? What tasks do you most want them to accomplish? How will they help your business succeed and grow? The more clearly you define the work you want them to do and the role you envision them filling, the more likely you are to find a candidate who’s an appropriate fit for your needs.

      One of the most important things to examine is which roles you want to keep for yourself and which you’d rather assign to others. Which items on your crowded plate should you delegate to an employee and which do you want or need to keep yourself?

      Let’s say you own a one-person hair salon, and you’re fully booked with appointments. But you’re frazzled. You have to carve time out of your day for scheduling, ordering supplies, and shampooing customers.

      You’re ready for growth and you have a couple options regarding what type of employee to hire:

      1. A receptionist/assistant. Someone to do the support work allows you to concentrate on customers and earn more per hour on doing what you love—styling hair. They can answer the phone, shampoo waiting customers, clean and order supplies. The downside: they don’t bring in direct, additional income.

      2. A second hairdresser. They’ll bring in new customers, more income, and help your top line to grow. The downside: they don’t free you up from the stuff you don’t like to do. In fact, you may spend more time answering phones.

      Most businesspeople face similar dilemmas when choosing what type of employee to hire. The choices frequently boil down to: hiring someone to help you take care of administrative or basic operations of your business, freeing your time for more lucrative activities OR hiring a salesperson to bring in more customers OR adding someone who does the same/similar tasks as you and who’ll, hopefully, bring in more money.

      Of course, for certain types of businesses, the kinds of employees you’ll need will be fairly obvious. Starting a restaurant, for example, you know you need a chef/cook, wait staff, and bussers. You may need a host or cashier. But even then, you’ll want to take a look at which of these jobs—if any—you’ll choose to perform yourself and which you’ll hire others to do. Perhaps you want to be the cook or the host. It’s a good idea to sit down and figure out which jobs you want.

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