What I learned from hiring my first employee

This is a hard subject to think about — my first hire. I won’t lie: I am cringing on the inside just thinking about how things went. Hindsight can be terrifying.

Despite the difficulties, my first hire taught me a ton of different lessons. As an aside, lessons are a much better way to phrase mistakes that you make, as long as you learn from them.

Hiring is a giant unknown before you do it. You have all sorts of ideas, notions, and plans on how things are going to work out. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that it will reduce your workload.

Once you actually hire that first person in your small business, everything changes. You need to throw preconceived notions out of the window. Employees don’t tend to reduce your workload — they change it. Instead of doing that work, you now need to do the work of managing the employee. The goal, of course, is that this doesn’t take as long as doing the work yourself. The dream is that it frees you up to do other things like marketing, strategy, or enjoying more family time.

In my experience, delegating an hour of billable work results in 20 minutes of reviewing that work, or training the employee. It is different if you are delegating non-billable work like admin, website management, or marketing work.

I want to say that I am a much better hirer or manager now, but it is hard to judge oneself.

Time for some backstory to set the stage: I had been in business for a year and a half when I decided I needed some additional help for the busy season. Because we are a tax and accounting firm, our busy season ranges from January to April. I decided to start the hiring process on what I thought would be “easy mode.” I knew the person, had worked with them in the past, and I thought it would be a great fit.

I failed hardcore — there is no easy mode when you are dealing with people. People are hard.

The position I had hired for was to do billable work, something that I was fantastic at. My turnaround time was great, I knew what I was doing, and it was why clients came to me. This was my first mistake lesson: I held my new employee to my own standards.

This is a huge no-no. You can’t expect a hire to fill your shoes in a role completely. They are not an owner and they do not have the same skin in the game. In addition, I was really good at what I was doing and I was fast at it. Faster than I could expect an employee to be. I also did not consider the time it would take me to review the work and then send it back to get fixed. If I didn’t send the work back to them and just fixed it myself, the employee wouldn’t learn.

My second mistake lesson was that I didn’t spend enough time training them on the process. Every company does things differently; it doesn’t matter that they might do the same type of work. They still use different software, preferences, and methods to do it their own way. Most of our processes were outlined but a good chunk was inside my head and not in place or a format that made it easy to follow.

I spent a few hours showing them the software and working through how I did things. Since I did not have enough of our processes documented, the training was majorly lacking. This then started a chain reaction. Our processes weren’t documented well enough, so our training wasn’t that great. In addition, the metrics for the employees were not clear. All of this, in turn, affected profitability.

It all became a giant cluster of horribleness that could have been avoided if I had taken some time before I had made a hire. I should have invested time diving into several areas before deciding to hire someone. Instead, I fell into the trap that I had more work than I could handle, and assumed that adding another person to the mix would fix things.

Unfortunately, I did not learn these lessons quickly. Two months after my first hire, I turned around and made a second hire in which I made all of the same mistakes and more.

It took until my third hire, which eventually turned out to be the best decision I have made within the company. Instead of trying to find people to do the work I was good at, I found someone to do all of the things I suck at.

If I could do it all over again with a new company, my first hire would be an admin. Someone to answer emails, keep up on software, provide follow-up, and take care of all of those little tasks that are easily forgotten.

What I learned from my first hire:

• Hire for what you suck at: My first hire should have been someone who could do work that I couldn’t do well. In my case, my third hire was an admin. This person should have been my first hire; they take care of all of the things that should take 15 minutes but take me an hour. They remove things from my to-do list that are just frustrating for me.
• Document your processes: Every company does things differently and all of your major processes should be uniform across the company. These should be in an easy-to-use format and you should have training for employees on how to perform your processes.
• Employee Expectations: Track metrics related to your employees. Things like budgets, hours they are going to work, and how often you are going to review the metics with the employee. This should be laid out before you hire someone and should be known to the employee before they are hired.
• Employee Profitability: You should have budgets for work, cost of an employee to do work, and the profitability of a client when serviced by an employee before you decide to hire someone. This is the only way you can know if an employee is profitable.