Are you ready to grow your small business

Being a mum with a small business to run means that you’re going to be – super busy. At some point, as a small business owner, we must face a challenging decision – is now the time for me to hire my first staff member? Hiring your first staff sounds exciting, but at the same time, you may start thinking what if the new hire doesn’t work out? 

Is this the right time to hire

Are you just too busy with your existing client base and need to turn down new clients? Think about it, you spent all of this time and effort to acquire a customer but you just have to turn them away because you cannot manage it by yourself. This may be a sign that you need to consider hiring a staff to help you out. 

Are your customers complaining? Sometimes when we are busy, the quality of work goes down! If you feel like you are not able to give enough time to complete the work and keep your customers satisfied, again you need someone to help you out and take some stress off your shoulders. 

Is there a skillset that you don’t have? Learning a new skill set is great, but it may not be the best use of your time. The most efficient way is to hire a staff who has that particular skillsets. 

Still unsure? You can try hiring a contractor instead

If you still cannot decide whether you should hire for the first time. Instead of hiring a full time employee, you can hire a contractor to test it out. If the contractor route works out well, you can consider getting him/her on board as a full time staff. 

Before you hire your first staff

One common mistake is that you don’t know exactly what that person is going to do on a daily basis. Before you hire your first staff, you should define clearly a set of job responsibilities and expectations for your new hire. 

Keep in mind, having a bad hire may place a negative impact on the performance of your business as well as productivity. It is important to make sure you put in place a hiring process and follow it through. Although if you are unsure how to do it yourself, you can always go to get external help. There are recruitment agencies out there, they specialise in different industry, i.e. engineering jobs and recruitment, retail and sales recruitment, etc. 

If you need help with your first staff hiring, you can also check out these great tips on the Fair Work website.