The unglamorous first hire
Not a salesperson, not a mini-you. The 15 admin hours most owners quietly spend every week — and the arithmetic of buying them back.
First-hire advice usually arrives in two confident flavors. “Hire a salesperson — revenue first.” Or “hire someone like you — clone the magic.” Both have a familiar failure mode: the salesperson quits in month four when the promised leads turn out not to exist, and the clone means two expensive people doing the same job while the other jobs go undone.
The interesting alternative starts with a week of note-taking. Most owners who track their time find 12 to 18 hours of scheduling, invoicing, chasing paperwork, ordering, and inbox triage — call it 15. That work needs to be done accurately, not brilliantly, and every one of those hours is an hour not spent on the thing customers actually pay the company for.
Which points at an unglamorous first hire: a part-time operations and admin person. The arithmetic:
- Cost: $22–28 an hour, 20 hours a week — roughly $2,200 a month fully loaded.
- Return: 15 owner-hours back. At $150 an hour of billable or sales value, converting even a third of those hours into real output is $3,000 a month. The hire clears its own cost at one-third efficiency — everything above that is profit and sleep.
Three habits make the role stick. Part-time first — 20 hours proves the job before it becomes a salary. The top five recurring tasks written down before day one; badly is fine, a bad checklist beats a good memory. And one number the role owns — “invoices go out the day the job closes” — so there's a scoreboard, not just chores.
The moment it's working is unmistakable: something breaks, and it turns out to have already been handled.
Filed under Hiring & People · Field guide: The Economics of Keeping People