Should I Hire an Employee for my Franchise?

Taking on an employee is a big undertaking for any business and, while a good sign that your business is progressing, can also entail a considerable amount of responsibility and risk. For starters, employees have to be paid promptly and in full, which can put a strain on your cash flow which is the lifeblood of any successful franchise business. There’s also the responsibility in terms of insurance and extra taxes you will have to pay, while your insurance and health and safety obligations may change now someone else is working in the business. Then there’s the actual management of other people and the training programs you might have to create to get them up to speed on your business.

As can be seen, hiring employees for your franchise is no small undertaking, so one of the biggest questions you’ll have to ask yourself as your business grows is, ‘how do I know when to hire an employee?’. With such an important moment, you want to make the right decision, so here we’ll look at six of the clearest signs that it’s time to hire an employee.

Six Signs your Franchise Needs to Hire an Employee

1. Customer Service is Slipping:

As a franchise owner, undoubtedly, you take pride in customers being highly satisfied with the work or product they receive. This can include after-care if something goes wrong or free consultations over the phone about how best to suit the customer’s requirements. It’s your business, and your own work ethic will mean you want it represented as well as possible. However, if this starts slipping, like not having the time to get back to queries or calling someone’s house to help them with something, then it’s probably a good sign you’ve reached a personal limit, and it’s probably time to hire an employee.

2. You Have to Turn Down Work:

Having a healthy pipeline of work means you know you have security and a steady flow of jobs for the foreseeable future. But what happens when that expands beyond three or six months? Is a customer going to hold on and wait, or will they look somewhere else? Also, if you’re that busy, can you make those commitments, or do you just have to say you can’t do the work? If it’s getting to that stage in your business, it’s clearly time that you hire an employee to expand your working capacity.

3. You Feel the Quality of Work is Suffering:

While doing a good job relies on the skill of the person performing it, they also need time to ensure that extra preciseness or add the finishing touches that make it a quality job done. As a franchise owner, you will want every job to be high quality, but on your own, maybe you just can’t because you have to rush to the next one. If you find this happening on a regular basis, then you should be thinking about how you’re going to find and hire an employee that can either do great work themselves or free up your own time to do it.

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4. Paperwork is Taking Up All Your Free Time:

It’s not always that you don’t have enough time for the work; it could be that you need a special type of employee to fill a skill gap that you have. One of the clearest of these is paperwork. Whether it’s filing for permits, doing your taxes or ensuring you’re compliant with regulations, paperwork can be a very frustrating task that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with your actual franchise. That is, if you run an auto shop or a bakery, it’s probably because you like the work involved, but the paperwork wasn’t what you signed up for. Hiring employees or even taking on independent contractors with specialized skills can leave you to focus on what you do best in your franchise.

5. You Aren’t Getting Any Free Time:

One of the biggest reasons to start your own franchise business in the first place is to take control of your schedule so you can make sure you’re there for important moments for your loved ones. Instead, you may find yourself actually taking fewer holidays or working longer hours and weekends just to keep up with demand. A lot is riding on your shoulders, so you don’t want to pass up work for a new business, but at the same time, you don’t want to miss out on important family occasions. The solution to taking back control over your schedule is to go out there and hire an employee that can take some of that workload off your plate.

6. Your Business Has Plateaued:

Since your franchise opened, maybe you’ve been on an upward trajectory as more work and revenue came in, but now you seem to have reached a peak, and it’s tough to increase your growth. You might even have spotted a great opportunity but know you don’t have the bandwidth to exploit it. Rather than treading water when you hire an employee, you’ll find that a whole range of possibilities opens up in terms of time and potential work.

To Hire or Not to Hire?

Even though making the decision to hire an employee involves a lot of responsibility and even risk, there are a number of reasons why you need to do it. This won’t apply to all franchises, at least not yet, but there will definitely come a time, as your business grows or if you want to pare your hours down when you have to make the call to take on someone else. Of course, being in a position to hire an employee is also a good sign of how your franchise has grown, so it’s not something to fear.

If you’re interested in opening a franchise in a booming industry with excellent growth prospects yourself, then why not consider doing so with Screenmobile? As a family-run franchise in business for over four decades, we have everything in place to help you build a growing business. To find out more, you can read about us here or get in contact with our team.