Hiring your first employee as a solopreneur
So many things to think about for your first hire, here are some thoughts on approaching it
Came a good question and comment from subscriber Tomis last week (shortened some of it to keep it brief for you):
“You might have already covered hiring for solopreneurs, especially when to hire your first employee… We should hire as soon as possible (as soon as we can afford it) and hire in the area that is not our "forte". Everyone is either a maker or a seller – all jobs can be roughly divided in these two – so if we are good at building, we should hire a seller. If we are good at marketing, we should hire a maker…
I'd love to hear your comment on this…”
This is something I’ve thought about a lot and definitely have some opinions.
First, I think you need to ask yourself if you really want or need to hire.
With the rise of AI and other tech, it’s never been easier to run a solopreneur business that can scale pretty big without the added stress and difficulty of hiring people.
If you haven’t hired before don’t discount how much of a hassle and time sink it can be:
define job and write job description
post it everywhere or work with a recruiter ($$$)
sift through dozens of resumes that are mostly crap
interview multiple people, multiple times, to try and find someone “good”
negotiate with the hire
train and onboard the hire
pray the hire is good, shows up on time, is competent and doesn’t quit/leave your company for another
In short, it ain’t that fun. So #1, ask yourself if you even want or need to hire.
If you do want to build a team, and there’s nothing wrong with that, then definitely be strategic about it.
As Tomis said, the best approach is to outsource the things you aren’t great at or don’t love. Another way of putting it is that you should be doing whatever adds the most value to the business.
If you’re the best person at selling your product, focus on sales and hire for the rest. If you’re an incredible product/tech person, find someone who can either market or sell (or both) for you.
The last part to keep in mind is when it makes sense to hire financially. This will differ based on a wide variety of factors (mostly financial), so what you need to determine for your own business is when hiring an additional person will help you grow revenue faster than your current rate.
For example, if you have no time to increase sales because your calendar is full with product/operations tasks, you should hire someone so you can spend more time on sales. The added time you’ll gain will result in more sales than the added expense of that hire, or at least it should within a few months.
Make sense?
If you’re like me though, you prefer to keep things smaller. Our team at Visto is just 3, and I also am very bullish on scalable solopreneur businesses that could be even be run off something like a Substack.
Liking this Substack and thinking of growing your own? Let me know…
Have a great day,
- Josh Schachnow
Canadian immigration lawyer, CEO at Visto.ai