Guest Post: Hiring your first employee, part 2

You can find part one of this series here.

Last week I left you with the following questions:

• Am I better off oursourcing your work to a virtual assistant, or similar?
• Would it be more worthwhile to have a casual or contract employee in my business part time?
• What role am I trying to fill?
• How will I manage this person?
• How will I fill this persons day, without feeling like I’m better off just doing it myself?
• What do I want to spend my time doing, and where do I add the most value to my business?
• What do I want to achieve in my business, and will this get me there the fastest way?

And I hope you took the time to consider them. Today I’ll be raising more questions as we discuss the importance of hiring the person the Business needs, not the person the Business owner wants.

This focuses on the third question in the list above:

What role am I trying to fill?

Sometimes the roles can be clear cut: you are going to hire a salesperson to sell your service or product. Or perhaps you’re hiring a bricklayer who lays bricks! However generally the first hire for a small business tends to come with far more ambiguous activities. For example: administration. This can range from paper pushing to managing accounts, and in some cases when you need the support of an EA or PA, you’re also looking for someone with skills in diary management, event management and more.

This is why it is so important that before you even place the ad, you know what role the person will play in the business, and what skills that role will require. Generally with your first hire you are looking for someone to cover the basic functions that the business needs — they are the tasks you are stuck doing when you should be working on developing your business!

The case for and against employing friends

Small businesses tend to turn to people they know and trust for support, and this can mean that you may approach a friend to work with you: you know them and you trust them, so what can go wrong? Well… a lot. If the relationship turns sour you don’t just lose an employee – you lose a friend as well!

If you are considering approaching a friend for the position, take a step back and look at it objectively:

• Does this person really have the skills you need in the business?
• Are you able to put aside your friendship and work with this person on a professional basis?
• What would you do if you had to discipline this person? Would you be able to objectively?
• Do you trust that they are able to put aside your friendship and work professionaly with you, including taking instructions?

If you don’t have a certain answer to any of the above questions, you probably shouldn’t be working with your friend!

Tasks and Skills

It’s time to sit down and work out what skills you need. Draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper to make 2 columns. On one side, write down the tasks that you need completed. On the other, write down the skills needed to complete those tasks. The more indepth you go, the more detail you’ll be able to give a prospective employee, and this will help you find the right person!

So for instance, you may have something like:

Task: Reconcile Bank accounts
Skill: Working knowledge of MYOB. Basic accounting knowledge.

Task: Take orders from customers
Skill: Basic computer literacy (email, MS Word), customer service experience.

Go through your list and consider: Can one person do all these tasks? Will one person possess all these skills? Your immediate answer might be ‘yes, I do’, but Small Business Owners are a special breed! When it comes to employment, you will find it hard to hire someone with a range of skills over, for example, IT, administration and accounting.

Perhaps you can create a singular role, but may need to outsource other tasks. Or you might even require more than one part time or casual worker with different skill sets.

Consider:

• The personality type you need. If someone is interacting with your clients, you’ll want them to have a warm, outgoing personality. However if they’ll just be helping you on site, that might not be as important.
• The number of roles and costs involved. You can easily research Australian award wages online.
• How long it might take until you need to split these duties with a second employee.
• Stability: many people aren’t used to roles evolving as a business grows, so this will need to be addressed.

If you are looking at your list and you are unsure, or feel you have too many ‘roles’ to fill, perhaps take some of the outlying tasks on the list and outsource them. Virtual Assistants tend to be quite wide-ranging in the activities they can complete, and you may find outsourcing a couple of items will leave you with a solid role for an employee. And as a bonus, the time you save in outsourcing those tasks you can spend on advertising, interviewing and researching your new employee!

Remember: many businesses fall into the trap of hiring someone they like, and then developing a role around them. Reverse your thinking! Define the role and then fill the specific position you need.

Stay tuned for part three (timing, cash flow and affordability) and part four (systems and monitoring) in the coming weeks.

Until then,

David Henderson.

David Henderson is one of a rare breed – a qualified and skilled financial services and business consulting professional who has also achieved success as a business owner and entrepreneur. David is a director on the board of a public company and CEO Asia Pacific of ROCG, an international professional services firm which specialises in family and privately owned businesses.

David is the creator of the exciting CashMAX™ suite of business accelerating tools specifically designed for privately owned businesses and based on years of work with thousands of SME companies. He has personally helped many of these owners generate their own business success.

For more information visit www.davidhendersononline.com

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