Balancing the cost of hiring staff to grow your business

Finally, you are living your entrepreneurial dream and have launched your own business, sales are coming in, clients are happy but the reality of the dream is that you are working a 70 hour week, you no longer have your weekends to yourself, your in tray is overflowing and you haven’t even started work on your VAT return which is due tomorrow.

Okay, so you may be familiar with the story. You have a few choices at this point – either hire a full time member of staff, persuade your partner to help with the admin (a common starting choice) or outsource to a virtual assistant… or of course continue to do it all. Before embarking on hiring someone full time, let’s just check out whether the figures stack up for you.

Assume a minimum of £10 per hour at 40 hours per week which means that over the course of a year you're spending £20,800 on salary alone. Add in the cost of NI, taxes, office/desk space, supplies, fringe benefits etc. at approximately 60% of salary and you're spending about £33,280 annually for your full time, in-house employee.

Don't forget the less obvious, and difficult to quantify, expenses such as overhead related to time and money spent filling and training your position, the cost of lunch hours, sick and holiday pay, and numerous wasted, non-productive hours on the clock.

Now, lets look at how it stacks up using a virtual assistant....

Rates average from £15.00 to £35.00 for a good VA, and depending on what tasks are being fulfilled. Therefore, assume a minimum spend of £22.00 per hour for your Virtual PA (vs £19.00 per hour for a full time member of staff) but with this model you are paying for the time that you need for the tasks you need to achieve on.

Many see their virtual assistant as a full time partner that has a vested interest in the growth of your business that will work in collaboration with you towards the success of your company - sometimes this is a very lucky work ethic to find in an employee. A virtual assistant is much more focused on the task in hand - your money isn't spent on gossiping with colleagues or extra long lunch hours.... after all, time is money.

Other than the money element, you are saving time on training, payments made to NI and HMRC, administrative costs, recruitment, base salary, benefits, office space and furnishings, equipment....

But then again, of course, you could continue to do the work yourself....

Would love to hear your opinions on this! Agree, disagree, what have your experiences been?