 So, a question I keep getting over and over again is, when should I hire someone? And that's a tricky question and let's roll back a little bit to, okay, you work in the IT business and I'm speaking from the IT business because that's the business I know. I've worked in it now. I've owned my business for 15 years and I've worked in the industry for over 22 now. I'm old to the great here and the reason I'm holding a piece of paper here is not because I'm reading a script obviously or I would be more concise but process and procedure is where you start before you start with the question of do I hire someone and I see this a lot with IT companies especially the one-man shows that start up and I'm not at all. I mean with a lot of us started there as a one-man band doing everything but unless you're working from the beginning with processes and procedures hiring someone doesn't make any sense you just end up adding to the chaos and having them going now what boss now what if you don't have procedures that funnel work to them and processes that bring work to them don't hire someone that is the step you need before the question becomes do I hire someone and I see that because you have to look at the process and go can I give this to someone else to do that's a challenge you have to find someone especially in the IT business yet to find someone with a lot of competency in the same things you're doing you know whether it be you focus on the firewalls you focus on this or in a small business IT support you're focusing on a lot of different things at once and sometimes finding staff that specializes in a task that you know you can delegate is very very helpful will allow you to grow your business when do you decide well when you think you can compartmentalize that process you know even if it's just answering the phone sometimes people hire out just the answering the phone portion because they're going hey I just need someone to take all these calls and kind of organize my jobs for me they don't have to be as technical to do that they just have to have some understanding take some of support calls is it a real call or can I just tell them to remove the computer and all their problems will be gone and back to the piece of paper I know what's going on with this laptop sitting here this little post-it note on the back plus which is some comment they had about the screen that was replacing here because it says was dropped screen broken and replace it and replace the hard drive on here back to process procedure I don't know who this particular person is I didn't personally meet them and that's because there's a process there's a process I have documented that my employees follow that is basically from the time someone makes a call of my laptop's broken what do I do and they say you should bring it into our store there's some starting at the retail store part they bring it in there's a write-up procedure there's a procedure for how to quote this there's standardized pricing for screen replacements this one because this was a touchscreen they know that that breaks the process so let's start with the normal process of we can flat rate most screen repairs but touchscreens are different so here's a touch screen repair well what do we do boss and what you have to do is if you don't have a guide some of it's going to be some trial and error but a lot of it just comes from my knowledge working in this business I know touchscreens cost more than regular screens to replace so we have to look up the part number on it look up the laptop come up with a price those are all procedures this entire process from quote to say all happened without me and I'm doing it on the retail side and talking about that because it's kind of easier to create processes for the retail side but we have them for our business side as well you know someone calls in I need 10 drops installed for infrastructure I can completely send Corey out on that lead and the lead doesn't have to come through me that's another process procedure and they can call our general sales line and we have people who answer the sales line sometimes I answer the sales I like answering it I still like doing that I'm not the external business owner who treats this as an investment I treated as an actively engaged business owner because I have a passion for doing this and but those procedures are so important before you ever get to hiring you have to be thinking about that from the time you start till you hire that person because you hire someone you don't have process procedure I'm sorry you're that person's not going to be very effective you're going to be very agitated they're not just mentally reading your mind but you always have to stop back anytime someone doesn't do a thing stop back and ask did you get the right training did you give them the right procedures to do that those are huge factors now the money and compensation thing that's that's going to be really variable in your area I watch people all the time again find employees and I'm like you're paying less than their market value you're not going to get the best and brightest if you pay less than market value what's market value well that's going to be determined by the market you're in I'm here just south of Detroit I know where the market value is what you have to pay people and what you have to do to retain talent and the things that we do here but I see people offering next to minimum wage for a store technician and going man this guy doesn't know about computers really you found someone who works for minimum wage who's not super great at computers and following processes I don't know what you're looking for it is an expense but if you're doing your business right you can afford those people you can afford good people on there it's a really tough thing it's not like there's a magic this is the process and let me lay it out for you for me to buy my special playbook and it'll tell you exactly how to hire someone I think you can get a lot of insight from different business owners reading different business books and things like that but staffing is hard I don't have a matter of fact I don't have a book recommendation for staffing I've just worked in places and when I was an employee I was fascinated with how things were done which is what led me to be an entrepreneur and let me be a business owner I was always fascinated by the process so the most of my learning was from direct hands-on do's and don'ts you know don't complain when you hire someone for minimum wage and can't believe they're not the star performer in your company but money isn't everything you can't have people as a star performer unless you set them up in an environment to succeed I never run around just saying if there's a failure or a ploy doesn't follow a process I retrain them when a process failure I look at my process is there a flaw in it I'm not so proud going man I have got the perfect money-making system and there is no suggestion that can make me do it differently I've had in staff who you know interactive with them hey I would it'd be more efficient if you did this sometimes I agree sometimes I disagree and you ultimately do have to make a decision you don't want to let just anyone influence you so there's this whole balancing combination there's not a secret formula and processes and procedures I mean after being in business for 15 years they've changed a lot we used to do a lot of desktop support now it's laptops on the retail side desktops are very rare and we do a lot of b2b support so there's processes and procedures for that b2b support being a much more uh nebulous hard to wrap your hand around I mean there's a call and support procedure and most of the problems are fixing outlook and printers and having documentation for each client it gets a lot more complicated but I've done this I've done kind of the process from quote to sail workflow I've got videos on that you know how we do things but before you hire someone the bottom line is you have to be and this is if you start a company I don't even if it's outside of it this is still the same thing you start a company often if it's a small business you start it with yourself unless you got funded to hire people from the rip um but you have to have lots of process and procedures in place and those are what gets you to those next level you compartmentalize as you grow the company and you get busy in certain tasks you end up focusing where the employee just does this thing and when you look at large companies and uh I we'd mentioned before my wife works for quick and loans it's very compartmentalized it went from you know the guy starting the business and closing loans to now they have individual people who just do the sales call portion who just do the verification portion who just do that and specialization and that's how you scale as a company is you keep compartmentalizing down and often you promote the people that were with you the longest because they understood all the jobs before that you had to then take and compartmentalize their job and slice it up so when do you hire the first person not until you have a procedure to give to that person and be able to hand them that job so that's my tip for that it's just a common question on there and uh the next question that people ask direct related is how do you handle payroll not internally uh there's a lot of laws and everything around it either use one of those payroll companies to do your payroll or in my case my accountant does my payroll because it's an inclusive service if you have a full service accounting firm that like the one we use it works great in you they just take care of it top to bottom they do my accounting my books file my taxes and create my paychecks for me i send them how much to pay the staff they pay them so uh that's when it comes to payroll you you if you're trying to save a couple dollars doing yourself i don't really think it's worth the headache maybe you do maybe you go man i enjoy filing forms in nine forties and everything else if that's your thing maybe you should work in accounting um they they seem to enjoy filing those papers i like the fact that they're filed properly with all the things in the right places and i don't get in trouble and until you're big enough to hire inside accounting and even then the same thing we're pitching we can be your outside managed it they're they're my outside managed accounting i haven't had a need to have someone staffed to file the government paperwork related to that work create all the paychecks it's worth the fees i pay them every month to handle that so uh that's my tips for today um as i get more questions i will try to come up with some of the videos to answer some of these things like this i mean they're important i never really after being busy for i don't always think about it as much i know a lot of you are starting out that are watching this video so uh there's other questions leave me below and maybe i'll compile another list and do another q&a here and answer some of the little tips that you're looking for and i'm also going to be doing some more business videos with my friend brett who i posted a video last week for we didn't have enough time to do one this week but i'm going to talk about more changes we're going to do here at the company kind of you can follow along with us and you know i like to be very real about everything that happens here and i'm very open about it so ask away um but no you can't know how much i make because it's sadly not much thanks thanks for watching if you like this video go ahead and click the 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