A solo Entrepreneur does everything in their business. The business can only grow as much as that one person can get things done. To scale your business, most often you have to hire others to help you get things done. However, relying on others can create problems. Sometime they don’t complete the work, you aren’t satisfied with the work that was completed, or you may just have gone over the budget in manpower to get the job done. Whatever the unforeseen problem, decisions have to be made to stay on budget to make the transaction profitable.
Sometimes it just boils down to allowing the current person finish, hiring someone else to do it or simply getting the job done yourself. Here are a few things to consider:
- Will you have enough time to do it yourself? Will doing it yourself hinder current tasks or goals?
- Will you go over budget if someone new is hired to do the work?
- Will hiring someone new guarantee that the work is completed successfully?
These are important questions to ask because time equals money. You may think by doing it yourself that you are saving money, but not if it takes away from other important areas of the business. If the budget simply cannot hold hiring a new person or hiring someone new is a risk, then that is not the best answer either.
So what do you do to try and avoid situations where labor costs you more than is intended:
- Plan as much as possible, including having clauses in labor contracts that cover dissatisfaction of work and the meeting of timelines.
- Shop around for comparable replacements of help within the same price range as the person you hired so that they can be brought in to finish jobs and not blow the budget.
- Have Standards of Operation in place to guide those you hire on how to perform the job as desired and necessary to get be successful.
- Factor in having to be a backup as a safety net to working with new people.
Now it is time to make decisions!