Hi everyone,

I've been working as a freelance website designer with a bit of programming skills in Coldfusion and PHP. I started february last year (2003), and so far, I've only got a few clients.

My work requires me, myself, to do the following:
- Book keepings, invoicing, taxation (and other administrative stuff)
- Find potential local businesses/clients (sales & marketing)
- Travel to clients' premises for presentation/meetings
- All the technical stuff such as web/layout/graphic design, programming, managing hosting and domain names, and seo/website promotion as well.

This year, i'm planning to really market my services to local businesses, so I'm hoping (*Praying =) and expecting that I'd get a lot of orders and incoming telephone calls/emails/enquiries, PROSPECTS! :]

So I plan to 'invite' someone into my business to help me doing web development for local small/medium businesses.

I got a friend who's ready to work for me (I'll call/meet him sometime in these few days time to make a deal).
Now, here's what I'm confused about, plz help me.

These are the options I could think of so far:
1. Should I employ him and let him work full time for me, and pay him full-time wages (in turn, this is very2 costly for me, 'coz as i mentioned above that i've only got a few clients, and my business has just started).

2. Or, should I employ him as part-timer, say Wednesday to Friday (so I can arrange all meeting appointments with clients to be made on wed-fri, so my friend will be around in-house for answering calls and doing all those technical stuff while I'm away meeting clients)

3. Or, should I employ him as a shift worker, in other words, I ask him to come to work only when there's a job/project. But with this, I only pay him a part of the total revenue of the project, say 50-50 to be fair. His responsibilities only include designing, programming and developing websites.

4. I believe this may not be the best solution to my case, but here's the best I can think of.
I employ him full-time, but i pay him part-time wages plus commission that comes from each project, say 30% for him, and the rest into my pocket.
His responsibilites will be working as a full-timer in-house, doing only technical tasks (design, programming, hosting, domain, answering calls), and oh yeah, I also plan to get him to meet my clients instead of me in the future.
So all I'd do is all really really only business tasks.

Pls keep in mind that I'm trying to minimise operational cost of my business, in this case, labour cost (since this business hasn't yet been very profitable).

Thank you very much for anyone who contributes in helping me to solve my 'headache' :D

Cheers :tup:

I don't think you should not be hiring anyone until you have more money than time, but it depends on how large your clients have been.

I would set a milestone, say 3 consecutive months over $3K for example before you hire a sole. You need to be able to justify the expense against extra revenue, so for example, if you hired someone for $2K a month, it should result in $2.5K extra sales or revenue. You should know for sure that the exta help is going to put money on your bottom line, not just free up time.

Employees are expensive here in California, with workcomp and insurance you pay far more than the actual wage. So it may vary where you live but if you pay $10 an hour your real cost is about $13+. I think you need a more detailed business plan to work up the cost/benifit numbers.

Hello irvin,

From what you said, I'm thinking that you are feeling that you can't handle everything by yourself anymore.

I will suggest you think about which part you are best in, and get help on the other fronts.

example, if you are a good webdesigner, then you can focus on webdesign part, and find help on marketing/sales.

If your friend can help you on webdesign, then I think it's better to split profit on projects with him in the beginning.

And like vantaticman7 said, make sure you keep an eye on your budget as well.