 back to a new episode with my friend Andrew Coussel from Valor Accounting Services. Andrew, how are you today? I'm very well. How are you doing, Leo? I'm very well, very well. How is London? London's not bad. It's gloomy but it's not raining, which is good. Nice, that's always, always a positive, always a positive. Fantastic. Well, thanks for jumping on again with us and today we're going to be talking about hiring staff. Well, that is probably one of my favorite topics and one that I get asked on a regular basis from coaches who want to bring on staff to even grow and scale their business. So over to you, Andrew. Talk to us a little bit about what we're going to discuss today. Yeah, brilliant. So essentially, we're going to be talking about just the basics of what does it mean to hire staff, when to hire, different scenarios around that, and the different types of staff that you may hire in your sports coaching business. Then we're going to look at the more the accounting aspects and then the financial aspects of hiring staff. So start off with just the when to hire. So I guess there's going to be a number of different scenarios along the stage of business you're at. Now, for most businesses, they are going to probably experience hiring staff when they're off sick, they're on holiday, they need cover. So that would be one of the occasions where that would happen and it won't happen too often, but it will happen. Now, another one would be if you want to hire a certain member of staff which has a specific skill set, which you don't have, that could offer a more of a more of a rounded service package could compliment what your what your sports coaching business does. And just to provide different level of service as well to your clients. Another one would be expanding the business, business growth. You want your sports coaching business to get bigger. And by doing that, it does mean you have to hire additional staff to you to achieve that goal. Another one would be off season. For example, if you want to prepare and you want to train staff for peak seasons, for example, when it's very, very busy and you want to hire maybe an assistant coach during those peak seasons, you may want to hire them at the off season, especially if they're just starting out. So that gives you a bit of time to prepare them to train them up. We'll see you talk a bit more about that as well later on. And another one as well, which a lot of business owners do especially starting out struggle with is they just want to focus on other areas of the business. So there we go. Yeah, like that. So essentially, for those watching when we're talking about hiring, okay, it's not just hiring an assistant coach, right? We're talking about you can hire maybe a receptionist. I want to do your admin, social media. Okay, so it's not just specifically when to hire an assistant coach. Am I right, Andrew? You know what, that's it because it's about you as a business owner when you've got your, when you're just running it yourself, you may want to hire, and we're going to actually talking about it now, but you may want to hire other members of staff to increase your capacity on the pitch. So going on to that is first of all, we're going to look at different types of staff that you can hire on the pitch. And first one is maybe a replacement. Maybe you want to take a step back from the business and work on other areas. Or maybe you want to compliment your, you know, level of service by hiring a, for example, if you're a football coach, you may want to hire a coach that specializes in goalkeeping, potentially, you know, maybe you want to do a masterclass and maybe hire them on a one off occasion, you know, and also you may want to hire an assistant coach as well. And we can talk, obviously we'll talk a bit more about like hiring an apprentice as well. That can be quite beneficial, especially when starting out. And then we talk about off the pitch. Now, as Leo said, you may want to, you're going to be doing a lot of things as much as, you know, you may be passionate about delivering the level of service to your, to your clients on the pitch. There's going to be other things you're going to be doing. There's going to be the account side, the tax side, you may have to hire a bookkeeper, an accountant, some contract them out. Admin, there's might be a lot of admin that you might need to do. So you might need to hire a virtual admin or an in-house admin. You may want to have a business coach, a mentoring coach, for example, to help you scale your business. You may want to hire someone to do your marketing, because that as well can take a lot of time. Oh, you might want to just hire someone to help recruit for players, for example. Yeah, so there's definitely, you know, different reasons to hire different types of staff. Yeah, it's a good point you made, especially when you're talking about different areas of expertise, because last week I had a conversation with a coach who's in soccer as well, soccer football, and currently he's working, so he's running the business by himself. He's got 150 kids that he trains on a weekly basis, but he's doing it all by himself. So he's doing the admin, he's doing the coaching, and I said to him, you know, man, you're doing really well, but it's going to get to a point where you're going to get burned out, because you're doing just too much. So hopefully I'm definitely going to send him this video to watch, but that's something, you know, 150 players is great. It's a really good business, but it gets to a point where you're like, right, bring someone in to at least do the admin work, right, the reaching out to parents or the sending out emails, or to do the social media content, because he was at a point where he was doing everything by himself. Yeah, yeah, and that's, it is so true, because it really depends on what the business owner wants to do. It could be something that they're happy with the level of turnover they're getting, their income, but they just want to free up a bit more time, and hiring someone off the pitch may help do that. You know, it's not all about expanding for growth. It can just be, you know, having a bit more peace of mind within your business, you know? So yeah, okay. Now we're going to be looking a little bit, touching on the accounting aspects of hiring staff, because especially when starting out as a sports coaching, you know, as a sports coaching business, you don't really, are you going to hire a full-time employee? You know, that's why that can be quite overwhelming, you know? And so what I would say for, you know, sports coaches that want to try out, and this really does come into when, you know, you're off sick or you're on holiday, you may just want to subcontract a coach that is maybe does, maybe has their own business, maybe has a full-time job or doesn't have a part-time job, and subcontract them out, see how they're doing, right? Because you don't have to be tied down to having to set up a payroll system, because that's what essentially happens when you have a, you know, an employee, whether it be an apprentice, a full-time or a part-time employee, you have to set them up on a PAYE system, which is called Pay As You Earn system, and it's the payroll system we have here in the UK, and you have to have that set up if you want to have an employee working for you. However, if you want to first, like, subcontract sports coaches, you don't have to do that, because essentially what would be the agreement would be they would maybe work one or two days during the week and see how it goes and what they would do, they'll just invoice you for the amount of time that's worked, you know? So that can be a good start to getting into starting to employ someone, because that you may want to employ them full-time, you know, it's a good trial period, because another thing as well when you start getting into employing other people is, you know, there's HR gets involved, you have to kind of, you have to, you know, create an employment contract, you know, there's certain clauses in there, so subcontracting can be a good middle ground before getting to hiring an employee, you know, full-time, for example. Nice, I like that. So going to your point on subcontracting, because this is a question I get asked a lot, so with subcontracting, essentially the coach invoices you or sends you the invoice, you pay them and then they are in charge or it's their responsibility to then file their own taxes, right? Yeah, that's correct. So they're essentially depending on their circumstance, as I said, if they are a business owner themselves, they may be, they would send out invoices anyway to their clients. Okay. And what they will be doing is just sending you an invoice, same sort of thing, if they were in full-time employment in another, you know, company or another business, they would do the same thing, but as you said, they will be filing their own taxes separately, yeah. Okay, brilliant. Okay, now we get to the last bit, which is more of the financial aspects of hiring staff and the reasons around that. So you may want to hire staff to grow your business. Now, this is an interesting one, because it is very much case-by-case basis in terms of the business. Even if you're a sports coach, every business is different, because you're going to have different sources of income. You're going to have different income, you know, models in terms of you're going to be charging a monthly membership. Are you going to be charging one off? Are you going to be block booking, you know, one-to-ones? Are you doing online? There's a number of things. However, just to generalize a little bit, it is about identifying, okay, you want to, how does hiring someone contribute to your increased revenue? And with that, that's why it's very, very important when you want to grow is it can be, there is going to be an element of risk in anything, whether you're, you know, doing a marketing campaign and you're investing money in that, you want to see a return on your investment. Now, a good way of doing that is obviously monitoring that and doing as much research as possible. Whereas when you're hiring staff, there's going to be a number of different factors here. The other factor as well is time management. You know, you've got to see if you're going to be hiring a sports coach to take over what you're doing, what does that mean to you as a business owner? That means you can maybe spend more time on other areas of the business. And that's probably your goal. Or maybe you want to spend time doing more income generating activities, for example, maybe online coaching, merchandising as well. And this is where it's very important to sit down with, you know, a business coach in that field to discuss these things. And also another one is scalability, because if you're taking on more staff, that means that you can increase your capacity, which means you can take on additional clients. That may take time. So you've got to understand that there's going to be a time where you may not generate as many clients first because you've just started out and that might tie in with the marketing side as well. So a good strategy allows you to minimize that risk of hiring that extra staff member and making sure you get a maximum return on investment. Does that make sense? Yep. No, I like it. And also going back to where you were talking about maybe focusing on other areas, it could be a case where you want to spend more time with your family as well. So you bring someone in to kind of run it for you. Because that's also another thing that's really some coaches really struggle with. They're running so many sessions and then they don't end up having any time for themselves or for their family or doing things away from work. They're so in the business that it gets to a point that you can essentially long term burn out. And I've seen it with coaches. They end up hating what they're doing because there's no escape from it. They become kind of trapped. So yeah, it's building systems where you can bring in coaches to do some of your sessions or do the admin work like you said. Yeah, exactly. I think and that's such an important point. It is about, it is really starting with the goals of the business owner. What do they want to achieve? Because from that you can start doing things like, as you said, you can take a step back from the business, spend more time with family. Or if you want to grow the business, spend more time on other areas, you may want to focus on business development and that can take time. And maybe you want to, another thing as well is it's all interlinked. You may want to have a sports coach, a mentor to help you with that. But you need that time to do it in the first place. Correct. Yeah, yeah, completely agree. Fantastic, Andrew. Well, anything else before we wrap up? That is it. That is it in a nutshell. Nice. That's brilliant. Thanks again, Andrew, for coming on here and sharing your expertise with our audience. If you need to contact either Andrew or myself, we're going to put all the links at the bottom so you can do that. But thanks again, Andrew. And I look forward to our next chat. Thank you.