Recently I spoke with a client of mine and while he was talking about his own business the message rang true to me as he said something along the lines of he’ll never get rich trading his time for money as there’s only so much time in the day and he can only dedicate x amount of time to each of his clients even if he continues to raise his pricing model up. Now I understand that’s a very basic concept of business/finance but up until this point, I feel like I almost forgot to think about that while I’ve been busy trying to grow my own business.
I mean currently, I manage a handful of clients including him where I do SEO for them on a month-to-month basis and things feel very manageable now where I’m comfortable bringing on new clients and feel I can dedicate the appropriate amount of time to each one of them but I’ve started to ask myself at what point would I actually be able to hire an employee to help me out? Is it at a certain number of clients or maybe a certain amount of revenue/profit? and then I have to be able to afford salary, benefits, etc… because I don’t want to be a terrible employer when and if that time does ever comes around. So I guess what I’m asking is when should I be looking to hire?
You should honestly be looking to hire someone as soon as you can consistently afford too. Depending on what field you are in there are about 2-5 specific tasks that you do that bring in the vast majority of your revenue and everything else in your business is built around supporting the critical tasks.
The best thing you can do is quickly create a set of repeatable steps for every task that is not critical to making money and then hire someone else to do them while you focus on the important things. Others are right about finding a VA and having a clear system in place will make it easy to train them and give you good metrics to evaluate if they are doing the job properly.
I highly recommend reading the e-myth revisited, if you haven’t already, as it explains everything in better detail.