Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

When Should You Hire Help?

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Running your own business, whether that’s in the form of a blog, or consultancy, or any other form of business can be draining. As the owner, you’re the first employee.  You’re also the only employee in some cases. It’s stressful, hectic, and tiring. It’s not for the weak. As your hustle grows, however, you might begin to feel a little burnout. It’s not necessarily because you have lost the passion for the business, but just that the work is starting to overcome your ability to stay awake. Starting your business is the first hurdle you must overcome. Knowing when you should hire help is the second.

Should you Hire Help?

When Should You Hire Help?
When should you Hire Help?

The answer to this question will likely haunt you for a while until you come to a decision. If you hire too early, you might struggle to pay the help, or have to pay yourself less than you are.  Or you might find that you don’t have as much work as you thought you did, and lose the help due to lack of work. Hire them too late, and you end up playing catch up to try and keep the pace.

If it’s such a hard decision, how do you decide?  I think you have to seriously consider a few questions.

  1. Can you afford help? Seriously consider whether your company has the resources to pay for the help. If it doesn’t, it’s time to take a very serious look at the methods you’re using for your company, and if there are ways you can improve the business in order to fund this expansion. Don’t be afraid to look for someone to help part time, or to try out a virtual assistant to help with smaller tasks that you can offload.
  2. What sort of help do you need? Before you really get down to finding someone to help, you have to know what it is that you need help with. What are your strengths that you must keep doing for the business?  Keep doing those. If you’re the face of the company, you’ve got to keep doing the PR work. Find the things that you don’t like doing, or that take you away from the strong work of the company and hire help to do those things.

Where can you hire help?

If you’ve answered those questions, you’re well on your way to hiring help for your burgeoning empire. Now, it’s up to you to find the help. Where you look will depend on what it is that you need help doing. Depending on the area you live in, there might even be local help that you can find. Local can be a great place to look for an accountant, for example. Accountant help is probably something that you’d rather have local anyways.

But, if you’re just looking for a little part time help writing content or scheduling social media, there are plenty of places that you can look. Check out online exchanges like Upwork or TextBroker.  You can find any number of freelance workers there who will work in a very temporary manner but that can also be more long term if you desire. Fiverr can be a great source of help for simple one-off projects.  If you’re looking for design work, someplace like 99Designs might be a good place. If you’re lucky enough to just be looking for some help with managing growth, maybe all you need is a business consultant.

Find Referrals when you Hire Help

Another great place to look is in professional groups on Facebook. Look around for groups that are for entrepreneurs, business owners, or that are related to your trade. Join them, and participate, as they can be a great source of knowledge for you.  They can also be a great source of help. If you’re looking for something in particular, you can usually post and ask for referrals for someone who does what you want to have done.  It’s a great way to find someone who has done that work before and done it well enough to earn a referral from another business owner.  And there’s a pretty good chance that the person who you are referred to is a small business owner as well.

Yes, owning a business can be hectic. Yes, it can be stressful. And, yes, it can mean working more hours than you’ve ever worked before. But, it can also be immensely rewarding and freeing. You’re doing your work, your way. And people are paying you to do it.  What could be better?

Don’t be afraid to hire help for your business, but make sure that you’re doing it the right way. Don’t rush to hire someone, but, similarly, don’t wait too long either. It’s your company, run with it. Enjoy it.  And hire help when you decide it’s necessary.

I Quit My Job: Recovering

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When I finally put in that two-weeks notice, I was floating on this nice little cloud, high above the world, happy with my decision and feeling like I could do no wrong.  Like Andrea of So Over Debt put it, it was the first good nights sleep I’d gotten in quite a while.  And, of course, for the two weeks that I was still working, I stayed on that cloud, anticipating that last day, and the end to my tenure at that employer.

As those two weeks went by, I went from anticipating the day, to downright demanding it came faster.  As more and more of my tasks were transferred to temporary replacements, and I packed more and more of the stuff off of my desk, I began to think about all the things I could be doing at home, at my computer, with this site, and my other sites.  It was torture!

Balloon LaunchAt the end of those two weeks, I nearly ran for the door!  I was already filled with ideas of what I would write the next day, the things I would do, and the changes I could make.  Little did I know that I had a bit of a different path planned.  You see, I woke up early the next morning, with the flu.  Yep.  I spent my entire first day of self employment with the flu.  The following day, I was well enough to at least sit at my desk, but being productive was almost certainly out of the question.

One of the things that I decided, early on in this adventure, was that the income from this and other sites wasn’t going to be enough to make up the difference, or even to make a dent in it.  I would have to get a part-time job in order to help pay the bills, while I built the sites up to a reasonable income level.  I already had a lead on one, so the first full week of self-employment, I went and met with the owner and we worked out some details, and I started last Thursday.  The part-time income from that should help with the bills.  I’ll get a bit less done on my sites, as I’ll be working three days a week, but it was something that I felt/feel was necessary in order to keep some constant money coming in while I work on building other things.

Now, a full week and a half after I quit, and the holidays rushing in on us, somethings are coming back into focus.  I’ve always gotten a bit worked up about finances.  That’s why I created this site, after all.  So, knowing that we lost over half of our income and will only be able to constantly replace about 1/3 of that income immediately, has me a bit stressed.  My wife want’s to do some holiday shopping, and my natural instinct is to shut off all of that, and “give hugs” this Christmas.  It’s caused a bit of friction, but I’m sure we’ll figure it out.

I’m recovering.  From the high of quitting my job.  From the flu.  From stressing entirely too much over money.  From a lot of things.  Such a major life change is bound to require some recovery period, and I am confident that I’ll come out the other side.  There’s just a few bumps in the road.  What an adventure!

photo credit: alibree

My Wife Quit Her Job

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Before you get all excited, this isn’t a story of financial bliss.  Less than 3 months after our second child, a daughter, was born and amid all this turmoil in the economy, my wife quit her job.  Why?  Suffice to say that she was extremely unhappy at the position and didn’t feel that she could return to it after her maternity leave.

The decision came much easier for her than it did for me.  I didn’t have to work there, so I didn’t have the same problems as she did.  But, most of all, my trepidation came from the fact that my salary alone could not support us.  We would need to find a new source of income, and quickly.

Decisions made, my wife sent her resignation letter to her employer.  And then they sent back a bill.  You see, my wife was on maternity leave which is covered under the Family Medical Leave Act.  In that law, there is a section that states that if the employee does not return from the FMLA leave, the employer can reclaim any expenses such as health insurance that they incurred while the employee was on leave.  It was not a small bill.  If I recall (who am I kidding.  I remember.) it was just over $1200.00.  As you can imagine, we were both devastated.  Not only were we jumping directly out of the pan and into the fire, but now they had turned up the flame.  We could pay it out of savings, but it would put a very serious dent in it.  And that was money that we were counting on to keep our bills paid until my wife started earning money again.

You’ll have to excuse me a bit, while I digress.  I want to explain how we planned on getting my wife making money again.  We have, for several years, been active sellers on eBay.  Never anything on any grand scale.  We’d hit a garage sale here, and an estate sale or auction there and see what kind of easter eggs we could find.  Having had that already in gear, we decided that ramping it up would be the easiest (and fastest) way to get some income coming back in.  So, we began the search for more product and more suppliers for the product.  End digression.  I think I’ll leave any other details of that operation to another post.

So, being the natural arguer that I am, I started doing a little bit of research on FMLA law.  I’m no lawyer, so basically all I did was confuse myself further.  My brother, on the other hand, is a lawyer.  Well, he will be sometime around May of next year.  But, he happens to be working at a law firm and has access to all the lawyers and their resources.  So, I asked him to look into it a little.  A few text messages back and forth.  An email or two. And a letter later.  The bill went away.  Turns out, that by requiring my wife to take all of her remaining sick/vacation time as well as using her short term disability insurance (both of which were enough time to cover the entire 12 weeks), they managed to make it so that they couldn’t reclaim that money.  Sucks for them.  Turns out very well for us.  Thank you brother.  And thank you law firm that he works for, for the pro bono work on the letter.

After that was taken care of, we could really concentrate on ramping up the eBay selling.  We spent several weeks working out and implementing a way to grow the business.  As it turns out, it grew a little bit slower than we had anticipated.  And it certainly wasn’t going to make enough money to cover our expenses.  At least, not right away.  It might in the future.  I, being the one that constantly worries (read stresses) about our finances, was beginning to think that it was about time for my wife to start looking for a part time job, if not a full time one.  Little did I know the hidden paths that God reveals to us.

I told you before that the company that my wife worked for before wasn’t the greatest place to work.  Truth is, it started out as a really nice place to work.  Somewhere in between, it went very downhill.  My wife’s best friend got fired, my Wife got passed over for promotions that she had been promised.  And overall, everyone was fed up with the place.  So, another of their ex-coworkers, who is also a friend, approached them with an offer.  They would start their own company, doing the exact same thing as their previous employer.  They all three loved what they were doing, just not the company, so it made a lot of sense.

That was about three months ago.  They have since formed a corporation, gotten all their paperwork and such in order and opened for business on the 1st of August.  So far, things are going very well.  They’ve had more business than they had anticipated and things seem to be growing well.  We’re all hopeful that it will continue to blossom and grow.  Maybe one day, I’ll get to be strictly self-employed.

Of course, some of you will remember that I told you earlier that this wasn’t a story of financial bliss.  It may become one, but it isn’t yet.  We are still struggling to make our financial ends meet and likely will until at least the end of the year.  My wife gets paid for the time she works at the company and will likely get a little bit of a shareholder bonus at the end of the year as well.  And hopefully, they’ll be able to add a few new products to their line by then as well.  Until then, however, we’re learning how to flex our frugal muscles and save as much as possible so that we can pay our bills.