Often entrepreneurs get stuck on how to be able to afford to pay someone. There are so many options here that can be used and implemented. I have used all of these and continue to do so.
1. It is unlikely that you need someone full-time. In fact, I prefer to engage people initially on a part-time basis. This gives you the opportunity to see what someone is like if you work together well whilst at the same time keeping the cost base low.
For example – a bookkeeper – In Australia, a typical hourly rate will range from $35 to $50 per hour. So you can engage someone for 5 hours per week for around $200 per week. Often I will set it up on a trial basis for 3 weeks and see how it flows.
2. As mentioned before for clear outcome-based activity – such as sales – you could use either a low or no retainer approach with a commission for sales. This is a common approach in this space and pays on results. This may also be able to be applied to other areas of your business.
3. For delivery of a service or work with clients, you can use a percentage of the revenue. This keeps it simple, means you do not need to track hours and have cost linked to the revenue earned.
If you deliver a program, are you able to build a training approach for this and then engage people to deliver on a percentage of the revenue? This also works well for overcoming delivery in wide geographic locations around your country overseas.
4. Sharing a resource and team member
Often businesses have some resources that are not fully utilised or the person that is engaged part-time wants to earn more income – and they may lose them. The approach here is to contact other entrepreneurs and see if they have a team member that has a capacity that you can share either through direct engagement or through the business. I have done this both with my team members and also by sourcing additional people for a specific activity.