When to hire? How to Hire? And when to think about renting office space.

We are in the same position as a design/build company. There are two of us currently that do both project management and design. The last couple of years have been very slow/intermittent but this year we have been borderline overwhelmed to the point that my construction management time is taking 90% of the time I have for design work. After trying to get through our design projects, it leaves me very little time to work ON the business rather than IN the business.

I think the best strategy for anyone in the startup realm is to remain as lean as possible for as long as possible. “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries is a good book for all entrepreneurs albeit it focuses on tech. Having too much work is never a bad thing you just have to figure out how to handle it and become efficient. Once you can get solid, repeating business from a couple of clients, it will help stabilize the base level of work for your company. We debated hiring interns etc but given the learning curve of teaching a new person your system, it may take time away from productivity rather than helping. Next year might be more reasonable.

Is there anything you are spending a lot of time doing that is killing your time? Bookkeeping? Back office work? Drafting? Possibly focus on something that takes a lot out of your day and contract that portion out. That way you can free up some hours without a huge training investment.

Good luck!

Now days the solution seems to sub-contract/collaborate with freelance LA or LD. A great way to reduce overhead.

D’oh! Based on all these responses, all of us newbies (2 years or less) will never be hired, will we? Good to hear there’s enough business that you’ve (briefly) thought about hiring, though.

“adapt”… you said it! that’s the immediate solution. Know the feeling well as i am also a freelance/design consultant!         

all the best 

One thing that we can’t overlook, and NCA777 touched on it, is that it is one thing to out grow your ability to produce the work all by yourself and another thing to become a manager of people producing your work.

The questions are “When to hire? How to hire?” Most of us think that the “when” is simply at the time that there is more work than you can produce individually. The problem, as NCA777 said, is that the work requires his hand. The ability to manage help and still remain personally engaged and productive has to be considered as well. That is not a skill set that is inherently gained leading up to the need for help. Some people have it within teir genes and some don’t. Some of it can be learned, but you still need a certain baseline of that ability in your individual maleup to be truly successful at it.

I’d say that it is time to hire when you have the work load, the income stream (not necessarilly = to work load), and the cofidence that you can manage help to the point that the firm’s productivity excells the rate of return from the production time you’ll be giving up to manage the help and the financial overhead in adding that employee. That is a huge gray area.

The tough thing that goes with that is whether it is easier to invest and cultivate your people managing abilities earlier than when you are maxing out personal production. If you are personally maxed out, how are you going to maintain your work flow, train the new person, and manage the work of the new person? Could it be better to ride out the seasonal rush, if it is seasonally related, as an individual and save up the money to pick up that employee at a slower time? That way you can be under less pressure to produce as you cultivate your employee and your employee management skills.

This is something that I think about.

Nick, do you remember “Papercutter” from the other messageboard? he made a hire in the last year and seems to have gotten it down pretty well. You might want to contact him. He is good about sharing thoughts and experiences.

Nick – we’re at exactly the same point as you (and sounds like several of us who were forced to start our own shops because of the economy are). We are both working full time and often into nights and weekends, just starting to get ahead, thinking we could sure use some help – and WANT to help new landscape architects enter the profession, but its kind of scary -we don’t have the office space, increased overhead and hardware costs, software costs and time commitments (including bookkeeping and management time that we barely have right now) and long term stability. Looks stable right now, but what about next year? Before you posted this, I’ve been thinking we should call YOU to take on some of our graphics work! haha!

But seriously – and I think this is one of the great benefits of Land8 – I’ll be looking here first when we do think we can manage a new hire. I feel like its worked really well as a professional network. You can really get a pretty good sense of a person by what they write about and what they write….How about you others? Is this a place you’re going to look when you might want to hire either an in-person person or a contract worker?