How do you know when to do that?

For Justin, he believes that as a founder “you ought to be able to sell your product better than anyone else”. At the beginning he hired people to do the work so that he could completely remove himself from the fulfillment side of the business and just focus on the on the sales portion of the business.

He made a creative salary scheme for his employee with the idea that once they hit the revenue milestone the salary would increase. He brought in his first employee at a lower market rate and set expectation on the salary scheme. He rewarded his part-timer later for taking the chance and making the sacrifices earlier. So the formula he recommended was that for every 2k MRR, should equal to an increase in salary.

He also advised that Freelance rate is higher than the regular employees’ wage. He does not recommend having contractors at the beginning of the business. He mentioned that its important to set expectations that “you might be bringing the part-timers onboard full time once they hit the revenue milestones”. The amount should be around 10 to 15k MRR to bring in a second regular staff for the business.

He does not think its practical to bring in 2 part time employees like what Greg is doing. Justin advised that Greg needs to make a decision to pick one as a regular employee or he should have doing the sales and the other operations. He recommends outsourcing the expert services to lessen the overhead and increase the quality of the output.

For Greg he talked about how he hired 2 part-time VAs at the beginning to do knick-knack tasks and was really impressed with the quality of the job output. He compared the wages of the virtual assistants based in Philippines versus someone based in the United States. Justin warns against doing just that because the experiment could backfire and just doesn’t make sense.

Greg also mentioned how he hired the first staff he took onboard full-time. When he hit the milestone revenue after 6 months he promoted the employee to a full time job doing research, managing email, creating graphics managing social media, all high value services. Which in turn gave him more time to focus his efforts to building products or talking to customers.

He also mentioned the place where start-ups could look for their first virtual assistants. Websites like Virtual Stafffinder, Zen Virtual Assistants where he was a guest at a recent Podcast and Upwork. After mulling over Justin’s advise about his current staffing experiments, he announced that he will be giving updates about his decision on the next podcast.

Resources Mentioned:

• Podcasting Press
• Virtual Staff Finder
• Zen Virtual Assistants
• Upwork

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