As a business owner, it’s important to understand the benefits and drawbacks of employing trainers and other professionals in your business. Whether you are on the verge of making a hire, or you think you want to do it all yourself, or even if the thought never crossed your mind, this article will explore some telltale signs that the time is right for your business to hire employees.

Employees should not be a financial burden. Done correctly, employees and contractors will either bring in additional profits into your business or free up your or other employees’ time or energy to focus on profit-generating work.

So how do you know if hiring is right for your business?

1. Your service is not as good as it could be

If you are stretched so thin that your customer service slips sometimes, clients can get the feeling that you don’t really care about them or their issue, and they are likely to be unhappy. And you may never know! Only one in ten unhappy customers are likely to tell you or leave a review. Most of them will just fade away. It may be, that if you hired an employee and made sure every client got excellent service, that you would end up with happier clients, more clients, more work, and higher profits.

2. You are losing clients that you want to work with

Of course, you may not want to take on every client – they may not have the right type of case, or they may not the right fit for the personal relationship. But if you are losing clients because you can’t get back to them or you can’t fit them in, it might be time to hire an employee. Word can get around, and if you get the reputation of not being available, you can lose inquiries.

3. You are losing out on additional revenue streams

There are many types of services that dog trainers offer, but one person can’t do them all. Classes, private lessons, digital courses, board and trains . . . . Many dog trainers just refer those clients to colleagues.  But, if there are services that your clients are looking for that you don’t offer, you might want to hire someone to take those on.

4. You are working on cases that you don’t want to be working on

If you are getting inquiries in an area that you don’t want be working on, whether it be a particular type of issue, or even a service area, you could hire an employee to work those cases and not have to turn them away.

5. Your administrative/business tasks are not up to date

Have you done your bookkeeping, emails, marketing, materials creation, cleaning? It’s hard to do it all, and it all takes away from time you could be training and bringing in income to your business. An employee or independent contractor may be the solution. While there is a cost involved, having that work taken care of can free up your time and mental energy to be more profitable, or even just prevent burnout.

6. You eventually want to sell your company

One day you will be too old to do hands-on dog training. Or, there might come a day when you don’t want to do it anymore. You should consider your retirement, and part of your retirement income should be selling your company. You are spending years building your business, you should be able to sell that effort to someone else to continue to build on. If your business has employees, then there is a stream of income that is of value to potential purchasers. It may be a lot, or it may be a little, but anything is better than simply closing up shop and fading away.

What’s right for you?

Ultimately, you as the business owner need to be on board with the idea of having employees. It takes time and energy. But, the questions above may show you that it’s an investment that is worth making, because it will increase your business’s profits in the long term.