From experience, employees can make your break your business. It is well worth every ounce of energy you put into hiring new employees, because if you succeed, you can lay back and relax and let the money roll in. However, if you get shitty help, they are going to create more problems and headaches for you and you’re going to wish you had just done the work yourself instead.

 

Where to find new employees:

A good place to start is your friends. Your friends you can trust not to screw you over, and they care because they don’t want to let you down.

For the first few years after I started it was just me and a good friend doing the work. Not only was it more fun but I could trust him.

The other place I have found new employees to hire, besides through networking, is flyers. I have a local university close by which is perfect for finding young motivated people to help. Usually, I go to the big student parking lots and put flyers under the car windshields here. This work pretty well. I have also put little rip off flyers around campus. Here is an example of the windshield flyer I used last year:

 

How to Pay New Employees:

Pay well for good help. Don’t try to cheat them, it will reflect in their work. It is worth losing a few dollars on a job and keeping good employees around rather than trying to watch after your own pocket and go stingy on them to earn a few extra dollars. Currently I pay my employees with a percentage system, paying them a combined 34% of gross sales, which ends up falling in the range of $12-$20 per hour. I like paying them by a percentage because that way they are motivated to work, because they know if they don’t work they don’t make money. Also, I don’t have to worry about monitoring their timesheets.

Payroll services can be very expensive. Currently, I handle it myself using a combination of Quickbooks and Bank of America Payroll. I print the checks myself from the Bank of America Online Payroll website, and download the transactions into Quickbooks. This method is free if you pay through direct deposit or $5 a month for printing the paychecks for each hire. Compare this to Quickbooks payroll service which costs several hundred dollars per year.

It takes a bit of effort to set up, but once it is, it is very easy to handle payroll through. It takes me about 5 minutes to print up my paychecks on a bi-weekly basis.