Decide if you’re going to become an employer

Looking for someone?

You’re starting a consulting business.

You’ve done a lot of preparation and planning.

You’ve been thinking about getting yourself organised and ready to start trading.

You’ve used the tips in this series to help you with the pre-trading and business set-up phase.

Now’s the time to ask yourself if you’re going to employ someone or several people.

Now’s the time to think about whether or not you need staff.

Do you need staff?

If you decide you will need to employ people – in administrative roles, in sales roles, in delivery roles – you need to think about this sooner rather than later.

That’s because it takes time to find staff.

It also takes time to train staff.

Even if you have people in mind for the roles you want to fill,  you still need to think about salaries, job descriptions, contracts of employment, working hours, pensions and so on. That’s as well as considering the immediate issues of where your staff will work and how you will equip them to enable them to do their jobs.

If you intend to employ several staff you may also need to think about managing their performance and making sure people know where their responsibilities end and other people’s begin.

• Starting a consulting business that employs staff will mean that you need to think about your recruitment process before you start trading.
• Starting a consuolting business that employs staff will mean you need to think about how you intend to manage your staff before you start trading.

So, along with everything else you’re doing in your start-up phase think carefully about your approach to human resource management and set out to get things right.

This is tip nineteen in a series of one hundred tips for people starting a consulting business.

If you’re not sure about whether or not to employ staff immediately, take a look at tip eighteen which is all about outsourcing.

Consider the pros and cons of outsourcing.

What next?

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What did you decide?  Did you employ people or did you outsource, when you set up your consulting business?

Leave a comment about how you made your decisions.