When should you hire your first employee?

The wrong reason: "I'm exhausted"

Being overwhelmed is a signal, not a diagnosis. Exhaustion can come from too much work — or from bad scheduling, unpaid admin evenings, jobs that don't pay, and a diary with no travel time in it. Hiring someone to help you do unprofitable work faster just loses money faster. Fix the pricing and the admin first; often the exhaustion goes with them.

The three signals that you're genuinely ready

1. You are turning down profitable work regularly. Not "I'm busy" — actually refusing jobs you'd have wanted, for three months running.
2. Your backlog is stable, not seasonal. A four-week waiting list in June means nothing if December is empty. Look at 12 months.
3. You have a cash buffer of 3 months of the new salary. Because there will be a gap between paying them and them producing.

If all three are true, the risk is manageable. If only one is, it's early.

The real cost — not the wage

The mistake is budgeting the gross wage. The actual cost:

Wage + employer contributions + insurance + vehicle/fuel + tools + phone + their unproductive hours + your lost billable hours training them

Depending on the country, employer contributions alone add roughly 25–45 % on top of gross. Then add 3–6 months where they produce well below full output. A useful rule: budget roughly twice the gross wage for year one, and plan for them to be genuinely profitable only from month 6.

What they must generate

An employee must bill 2.5 to 3× their total cost for the hire to make sense — that gap covers overhead, downtime, and the risk you're taking. If you can't see where that volume comes from on paper, the answer is not yet.

Try these two alternatives first

• Subcontract the overflow. Variable cost, no commitment, no payroll. When and how to subcontract.
• Buy back your own hours. If admin eats 6 hours a week, that's most of a working day you could be billing. Removing the paperwork is often cheaper than a salary — the evening-admin audit.

Then hire an apprentice, not a finished tradesperson

Cheaper, moldable to your standards, and often subsidised. You trade time for cost — but you were going to spend time training anyone.

Know your numbers before you decide

This decision needs real figures, not a feeling: signed volume, collected revenue, refused jobs. Pro Speak Artisan's finance dashboard shows collected, signed and pending by month, quarter or custom range — the picture you need before you commit to a salary.