When is it Time to Hire a Team of Employees or Contractors?

Are you an entrepreneur or solopreneur? At some point, you’ll need to hire a team of people to grow your business. The easiest way to get the help you need is to hire a remote team. When you hire remote workers and contractors, you get access to a large pool of talent that you wouldn’t get if everyone had to work in a traditional office.

Should you hire a team if you have the funds? Maybe. Just because you can afford to hire a team doesn’t mean it’s a necessary expense. Not sure what to do? Here are some points to consider while making your determination.

1. Be prepared to adjust your processes

There are certainly challenges associated with managing a remote team of any kind. Specifically, managing a remote software development team can be rough if your team is overseas with a 9 to 12 hour time difference. Although you can find local software developers, you’ll get a better rate from developers overseas because the cost of living is much cheaper.

With a large time difference, working with overseas developers, designers, and programmers will require adjusting your client processes. You can expect all aspects of your projects to be delayed by at least a full day. If you’re used to providing certain deliverables for a client within 24 hours, you’ll need to bump that out by 48 to 72 hours. You’ll need the extra time to communicate with your overseas team.

Be prepared to adjust all of your processes to accommodate communicating with a remote team half a day ahead of you. You might end up having to exchange video messages if you can’t talk live. This will significantly slow your projects down, so try to hire people who are willing to stay up late or wake up early to attend a live call.

2. Are you losing sleep because of an impossible workload?

A business owner’s work is never done, but you shouldn’t be staying up until 1 a.m. editing typos on your website, testing web forms, and setting up complex tagging systems in your CRM. This is okay in the beginning, but if you’ve been burdened with these tasks for a while, you’re wasting your time.

If you’ve been losing sleep over tedious tasks, it’s definitely time to hire a team. Anyone can perform technical tasks when given proper direction.

Start by hiring one person to handle the work that eats up most of your time. Find someone willing to work on an as-needed basis, so you don’t have to commit to a full-time salary when there isn’t any work available.

Find someone who can update and manage your website, your CRM, and troubleshoot technical problems as they arise. Most website developers will be able to do all of these things.

Before long, you’ll have more time to promote and grow your business. This is important because 90% of all small businesses eventually fail. Most fail because they run out of money, but many fail because the owner doesn’t want to spend money hiring a team when they need help.

3. Are you struggling to make time for networking?

Networking is a critical part of growing your business. You need to attend industry trade shows, conventions, and other events to stay on top of current trends. These events also happen to be the best places to network with other business owners.

If you don’t have time to go to events, you’re missing out on time-sensitive opportunities to network with potential partners and joint ventures. In your absence, other business owners will step up and claim partnership opportunities you could have had.

Your time is more valuable than money. Hiring a team gives you more of your time. It’s not just a necessary expense; it’s a smart way to spend your money.

Don’t let perfectionism hold you back

The hardest part about hiring a team is knowing you can perform the tasks better. That may be true, but don’t let that hold you back from outsourcing your tasks. “Good enough” is good enough. Train yourself to recognize that not every task needs to be done to perfection to be done right.

For the tasks that do require perfection, take your time finding the right person for the job. Ideally, you’ll end up with a team that runs smoothly without much direction and produces high-quality work your clients love.

Anna Johansson: Anna is the founder and CEO of Johansson Consulting where she works with businesses to create marketing and PR campaigns.

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