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?”