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?
Bring on an employee when the time you save by offloading tasks to that person can be used to generate revenue in excess of the costs associated with that employee.
Example: You spend 10 hours per week doing administrative tasks for your business and 30 hours per week prospecting, selling, and servicing accounts. You can pay someone $20/ hr to take over those administrative tasks, which gives you an additional 10 hours to prospect and sell. With that 10 hours, you generate one additional $1000 sale each week. You just added $40k in annual profit while working the same number of hours.