Chapter 4
Hiring Employees
The Good, the Bad, and the Alternatives
Don't hire. Until you are getting less than six hours' sleep per night.
—John Buckman, founder of Magnatune.com and BookMooch.com
To those who have never managed a workforce, hiring employees can seem like the best option for accomplishing all that a busy entrepreneur has to do—and for getting it done in far less time than it would take alone. Ideally, this would always be true. In a best case scenario, having employees would allow you to get more done and reach your business goals more quickly and efficiently.
Employees can also help by performing the responsibilities that you would rather not carry out. For example, if you are most skilled in the areas of marketing and sales, chances are good that you are a creative thinker and probably aren't a big fan of tasks like accounting. Hiring an employee to take over the bookkeeping part of the business will not only free up your time to focus on those activities that are most important to building your business, it can also make your life more enjoyable by eliminating a duty that is not your main strength or preference. Most importantly, by allowing you to multiply your efforts through time leverage, hiring the right employees can be the next best thing to cloning yourself.
The Magic of Leveraging Your Time
Time Leverage—one of the greatest concepts in business—is the idea that you can exponentially increase the effort that any single person can put forth by adding ...
