Trying to get a little input as we are looking at hiring the first employee for our agency. We are a two man shop right now and the work load is getting too much, especially since we decided not to work those 80 hour weeks anymore (you should give those two day weekends a try, they are pretty nice).
My part is any and all development of sites/shops/apps for our clients. Fairly easy to offload some of the work here, we are already working with a few freelancers that can do my part in some projects. It's hard to find people that deliver quality code on their own, but we are getting there.
My business partner handles all the client facing tasks - from sales and onboarding to project management, support and upselling. Oh, and he also designs the sites in some cases. After a somewhat slow January things have really picked up in February and in between all the phone calls, emails and busy work he is hardly getting anything done on our new projects. We have about half a dozen good sized projects lined up but he spends a good portion of his days handholding exisiting clients. We are charging them for the time spent, but jumping back and forth between projects still ruins productivity.
So this is the area where we would like to hire someone. In the beginning they would get a few accounts - our more needy clients - and would be their point of contact. Smaller changes to content etc. could be done right away, more complicated stuff forwarded to me or my partner if required. At the very least our phones would stop ringing and the new hire would take over sending back and forth a dozen emails to get all the information from the client so we can just focus on getting stuff done. Ideally I would like to transition that person into somewhat of a project manager in the future, so they can take more of a leading role on smaller projects, working directly with another developer etc.
I feel like that profile should be pretty common among small agencies, so maybe some of you have some experience here. The problem is figuring out exactly what type of person we are looking for.
- They should be good with clients but not necessarily salespeople (all projects come to us)
- They should have a rough idea how a website is built and what is possible, but don't need to be able to develop themselves
- They need to have good organization skills but don't have to be experienced project managers
Right now we are looking at two options:
- Spend a bit more and hire an experienced project manager with a background in our field
- Hire someone with the soft/social skill we are looking for and teaching them everything else
A project manager would obviously be able to help us out much quicker, but I'm not sure if our small shop would benefit too much from someone implementing structures that are meant for bigger teams/companies. And of course their salary would decrease our profit quite a bit more.
On the other hand we also need help pretty soon, so spending months training someone might temporarily worsen our situation. However, the financial impact would be smaller and we can train them on exactly the stuff we need and then have them grow with the company. Some of the busy work is pretty easy to learn, and maybe sending them through a coding bootcamp for a few weeks would be enough to get a grasp of what we do.
As of right now we are both leaning towards the second option. But maybe someone here can offer some wisdom or bring up something we haven't thought about.
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