On today’s episode of A Drink With “The Hurricane,” Steve discusses when is the right time to hire more office staff to help grow and scale your business.
Today’s episode comes from a question that was dropped in our question box at the last Hurricane Bootcamp.
When do I bring on more staff? Who should it be?
I actually discuss this in our Blueprint For Success, which is included in our Rapid Results program and it shows how to scale and build a $3 million home care business.
One of the last parts of this is on the staff itself. It specifically talks about when do you hire new staff and who they should be and so on. If I’m brand spanking new today and I just got my license and I own a home care company it should be a two-person operation from the get-go. There should be one person who is executive level doing all the high level functioning things like the managing of the finances, accounts receivables, accounts payables, the marketing to develop the relationships with the referral sources to get the referrals to come in. We don’t have a presence, so I have to go out there and do it myself. I’d even go as far as to also interview caregivers. Now those tasks that I just said, although it seems like that’s a lot for one person to be responsible for, well remember this is a brand new business, there is no business yet. One person can handle that.
Now we have the second person who is more of an administrative assistant type role. Receptionist, a secretary, an executive assistant, whatever you wanna call the individual, they’re the person who’s answering the phones, they’re the ones who are handling inquiries that may come in whether it’s an inquiry for service or an inquiry for a job. They’re the ones who are doing the scheduling. They’re the ones who are doing all of the office stuff because that is where the person is going to spend the majority of their work time so that the owner-operator can get out and spend 15, 20 hours on the road drumming up business.
Now, I DO NOT recommend bringing on another person to your organization until that business has reached at least 500 weekly billable hours. Why do I like to wait until then? There’s a cost associated with hiring somebody. When you hire a person you don’t want to hire somebody to fire them, right? You want to hire somebody with the intention that this person is gonna work with me for a very long time. If I’m investing in paying this person, you gotta compensate people depending on what position it is, you’re gonna pay people anywhere from 30 to 80 thousand dollars, depending on what the position is. You have to be able to make sure you have the resources, financial, to pay this person week in and week out before you hire them.
That’s why I want you to be at 500 weekly billable hours because I know that 500 weekly billable hours is like 10 to 12 clients. If you have 10 to 12 clients, an owner, and an assistant can handle that and the revenue that supports that should be enough for everybody to be okay and then you can bring on that third person. From that point forward I really recommend every 500 weekly billable hours you bring another person into your organization. 500 billable hours is roughly 10 to 15 new clients on top of what you are already servicing, so it’s gonna require more caregivers. It’s gonna require more scheduling. It’s gonna require more billing. It’s gonna require more payroll.
There’s gonna be more time needed to do the tasks that were easily done when it was a smaller organization so you’ll need more folks for it. It could be a scheduler or it could be a marketing rep. When the business is doing over $1 million that’s when you bring on a marketing rep, so the owner doesn’t have to do the marketing. What I really recommend is the owner to continue to do the marketing, because the owners, I find, are more successful at marketing than most marketing reps are, but then you hire more office staff to allow you to be out there on the road, so you can be as effective as humanly possible.
As you’re continually doing this eventually your scheduler/recruiter may be one person who eventually splits and then just does scheduling because now you’re managing 40 clients. Then you have a recruiter because you need to constantly have a wave of new caregivers coming in to deal with the attrition rate and turnover.
As you continue to scale and grow, the magic number for me that I recommend is 500 weekly billable hours. That’s when you bring on a new person to your organization. Depending on where you see the holes in your business will depend on who that person is going to be.
There you have it that’s our topic. If you want a Rapid Results System you get a free ticket to the boot camp, so if you would like to attend it is worth looking into it further.
Remember, we can help you. If you’re having challenges, if you’ve been trying to scale and grow your business and you’ve been stagnant for a while or you’re just getting started and you don’t want to take two or three years to get to a point that you could be at in six months, pick up the phone.
Give us a call and let us give you everything you need to BLOW AWAY THE COMPETITION!
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