For those of you that have a small company that consists of only you, let me ask an important question:

Are you trying to create a job, or trying to create a business?

If you’re trying to create employment for yourself, then you should just keep doing everything yourself; whatever work you do, plus, paying invoices, running to the post office, doing the books, etc. You can usually make enough to pay your bills that way.

But, if your goal is to create value, that is, a real business, something bigger than just selling your time, if you want to create actual wealth, then you should hire someone. A few people, actually – you need to put together a team.

Hiring will change your business. Not only will you have more time to get more new customers and do more actual work for the business, you’ll have resources (human resources, that is), that will be available to do more for the business than you were able to do previously. Because you’re all alone, you can only do the minimum right now, the amount that satisfies an objective or an obligation, and no more. Because there’s a finite amount of you, and “you” are responsible for everything. So, you know that you should take photos of youself and your happy customers and put those on your website and your Facebook page, because potential

customers really like that, and you might get some more business because of it, but you don’t have enough of “you” to do that. You know you can probably get better broadband service at a lower price, but you don’t have enough time to even investigate that. You’ve had something wrong with your computer for a month now, and it’s getting worse, because now your computer’s starting to freeze up on certain screens, but you need to use it, and when you’re not using it, you’re in the car, driving around to sales pitches or to a client’s place to do some work.

These are examples; I’m sure you have you own issues that are due to not enough “you”. And most of those could be solved by the addition of a “someone”, as opposed to a “you” specifically.

What to do, right?

Well, you could hire someone. Even if it’s someone that does mostly administrative-type duties that works part-time for you, maybe 10 or 20 hours a week would be enough. I’ve owned three businesses, and have first-hand experience with hiring someone like this, and that’s when my business started increasing exponentially – when I got just a little help. The money I paid out for the extra help was worth in terms of the extra business I was able to accommodate. If I just use the last instance as an example, I broke even on the cost in the first few months, and by the 12^th month, I was ahead by around 600% of what I paid my AA. Now, I will say, I got lucky when I found two of these three women – they were smart, they worked hard, and they treated my clients like their own. And, those two moved to full-time status when my business growth allowed me to take on more full-time help. Very lucky. The other one? Well, not so lucky there, but that’s a story for another day. I did, however, still more than cover the costs of employing her.

A smart, hard-working person can really help you grow your small business.

And, there is another option as well. Sareen and Associates, in addition to being a professional CPA firm and offering business services like bookkeeping, accounting, tax work, payroll services, business consulting, incorporations/LLC formations, business case writing, etc. also offers a full range of back-office processing services for clients. We won’t provide an admin for you, but we will take over your A/R (accounts receivable, A/P (accounts payable), record-keeping (electronic and paper), cash flow analysis, budgeting, tracking of business expenditures and more. And, of course, as we’ve done for decades, we’re also happy to provide payroll, tax work, and more to your business in addition, but we won’t make you take a bundle of services – you can have as many or as few as you want, even if it’s only a single service. This will allow you to regain a fair amount of time in your professional life, and, you will also have the security of knowing that it’s all being done right.

We offer these back-office services because we’re good at it, and we know there’s a need for these services among our client base. There are many people here at Sareen and Associates that have owned and managed their own businesses in the past. We have a pretty good handle on what small business owners need and why. Arun Sareen, the owner and president of this firm, has owned over 20 businesses himself and currently manages three active business concerns, including this one. After more than 30 years of entrepreneurship, he has not only seen it all, he’s experienced much of it firsthand in regards to owning your own business. He is a formidable resource for small business owners to consult with, to rely on, and finally, to trust in terms of judgment regarding both the tactical execution and strategic direction of their respective small companies.

Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty here. It’s going to cost you money to hire someone to do things for you. You need to calculate the costs and the benefits. We can help you with this if you’d like. But, regardless of who does the adding and subtracting, this is what you need to do the math on:

1. Hourly pay and hours needed, or, monthly fee – if you hire an admin type person, you’ll need to pay him or her a market-competitive hourly rate, and you’ll need to figure out how many hours you want them to work per week. If you pay someone like Sareen and Associates to do your back-office processing (as an example), then there will be a flat monthly fee for that.

2. Taxes and benefits – you’ll have to pay taxes on employee pay, and if you’re going to offer benefits, those cost money too. This is not applicable if you’re paying a services provider like our firm to do work for you.

3. Other costs for the employee – will you need more telecom, more broadband, work space, a desk, etc. for this person? How much time and money will it cost to place the ads, interview a lot of people, etc.? Will they travel for the company? Do they need business cards, etc.? Again, a non-issue if you’re sending the work out to someone like us.

4. Look at your current cash flow – can you pay this person or company every two weeks or every month? You’ll have to enough cash on hand to make sure they get paid on time. Employees tend to quit if they don’t get paid on time.

5. Look at your profit – are you clearing enough to afford someone?

6. Forecast additional income – the whole point of hiring someone is so that the company makes more money. How much more can you make if you get some help? Be conservative in your forecast of additional revenue/profit, not optimistic.

Hiring someone may seem counter-intuitive right at this moment if you’re making just enough money to pay all your obligations every month, and then have only a little left over, but again, it depends on your ultimate goal.

Get in touch with us if you’d like to talk about this.