Should a Growing Business Hire Office Staff or a Field Tech First?

Are you and your partner out on the field a lot more and you're losing out on sales because you're not answering the phones or responding to leads fast enough? I think hiring a field tech first would be beneficial, give you and your partner more capacity to actually follow up with clients, process invoices and answer the phone. Your field tech can perform the work while you manage the business.

One thing to think about - hiring office people takes a lot of time and you won't be able to work in the field while you are doing it. I think the move is to replace yourself where you are at now, which is in the field. That's the place you have to get out of asap anyway. Find someone you can coach on how to do things your way. If you need someone to answer phones, you can pay a service in the meantime to at least pick up the calls until you can have the time to train someone on how to do it. 

I always like the idea of hiring people who make you money vs those who save you time. I really could use someone who handles my phone calls, paperwork and invoices and all that, but I have 2-3 hours from like 8:30pm onwards when my kids are sleeping to deal with all that. I can't be in 4 places at once during the day to make money doing a service. 

I think hiring a tech would be a good start for you, it could free up your time a little more to step away and deal with what you need to. Once the new tech is autonomous, that would be a great time to get yourself into a admin role or hire for that position.

I’d look at where the bigger bottleneck is right now, and based on what you described, I’d lean office first.

Another field tech gives you more capacity, but it also gives you another schedule to manage, more invoices to track, more customer communication, and more moving pieces. If things are already falling through the cracks, adding more production could actually make the problem worse.

One of the biggest shifts in my own business was realizing that admin staff aren’t necessarily “overhead” if they’re freeing the owners up to do revenue-producing work AND making sure the revenue you already earned actually gets billed and collected.

You also don’t necessarily have to jump straight into a full-time office employee. A strong part-time person handling phones, scheduling, invoicing, follow-ups, and basic admin could immediately take a huge amount off your plates.

Then you can actually see your field capacity clearly and make the next hire from there.

At almost $500k only a few months in, I’d be thinking less about “How do we personally keep up?” and more about “What infrastructure do we need so this can keep growing without depending on us to hold everything together?”

roselvaggio's point is the one I would build on, because there is a number behind it.

A field tech adds capacity but also adds a schedule to manage, invoices to track and another line of customer communication. If the admin side is already where things fall through, the second tech makes the pile bigger, not smaller. You end up paying for capacity you cannot dispatch cleanly.

The part that usually decides it: what is an hour of your own time worth in the field versus at the desk at 9 PM? If you bill $150 an hour on a truck and you are doing three hours a night of admin, that admin is costing you more than the office hire would, and it is costing it in the least visible way possible because it never shows up on a P&L.

HUGEHomePros is right that hiring office people eats time. That is real, and it is the actual reason most owners keep putting it off rather than the salary. Whatever you decide, budget for the hiring process taking longer than the job posting suggests. I recruit for these office seats for a living, so weigh that, but the sequencing question is the same no matter who you hire through.

Piggybacking off of roselvaggio & servicehomepro, VA would be the way to go. Way cheaper than hiring in office and very capable. Search VA or virtual assistant in social media and all the ads will pop up. Find one that is capable to handle your systems, and go from there. From experience it has been great

I’d track two things for a couple of weeks: how many calls are missed and how much field work is being turned away because you don’t have enough hands. That should tell you which hire is actually costing you more money right now.

You might even find that a part-time admin or VA handles the phones and scheduling for now, while your first full-time hire goes into the field. At almost $500k this fast, I’d want the numbers to make the decision.

Congrats on the growth

I agree with most of the others in here, the office hire is the more important one for your situation right now. Another tech could probably generate you guys more revenue but it would also come with a lot more of a headache in the office and admin space. Building a good foundation of operations will help you much further down the line.

What you could do is hire a tech part time and then trying to automate different things, like lead follow-up or sending invoices, using claude. Of course that depends on how much time that would take you to do, or you could outsource the work