Section
Business
- 993 words
Six pieces of paper you need before a first employee starts work
Taking on a first employee is mostly a paperwork event, and nearly all of it has to exist before the first shift rather than after it.
- 707 words
How to read one month of cash flow without frightening yourself
A profitable month and a month where the bank balance falls are not a contradiction. Here is how to read both numbers at once, using an ordinary month as the worked example.
- 984 words
A probation period is a promise to decide
Most introductory periods end because a date passed, not because anyone made a judgment. That is a waste of the only structured look at a new employee an employer gets.
- 807 words
Six things that keep good staff, none of which is a raise
Money is why people take a job and rarely why they stay. The reasons they stay are cheaper, duller, and almost entirely within a small employer's control.
- 869 words
Hiring for a busy season starts before you know how busy it will be
Seasonal staff are hired in the week the work arrives, which is the week the good candidates are already committed. The arithmetic works better six weeks earlier.
- 1,000 words
What one bad hire cost a four-person shop, counted properly
The wage is the smallest line in it. Counted across seven months, the bill included two customers, a stretch of overtime, and most of the owner's attention.
- 791 words
Fixed price or time and materials, and who carries the risk in each
The two ways to charge for a job are not two ways of arriving at the same number. Each one hands the uncertainty to a different person, and that is the whole decision.
- 824 words
The receipt shoebox is not the problem, and tidying it will not help
Every spring the same advice circulates: get organized, go digital, keep better records. It misses what actually goes wrong, which is a decision nobody made in March.
- 928 words
Scope creep is a paperwork problem before it is a personality problem
The customer asking for one more thing is not being difficult. They are working from a document that never said what was excluded, and neither of you noticed until it mattered.
- 883 words
Contractor or employee for the same work, and what each costs by year three
The hourly comparison makes a contractor look expensive and an employee look cheap. Both impressions are wrong, and the reasons take three years to show up.
- 818 words
The offer letter said one thing, the handbook another. Which one held
A verbal promise, a two-paragraph offer letter and a forty-page handbook can each describe the same bonus differently. When they disagree, the answer is in how they are written.
- 994 words
The number of jobs a month that pays for the truck, worked out
Every business has a figure below which the month loses money regardless of how hard anyone worked. Most owners have never calculated theirs, and it takes about an hour.
- 919 words
Write the job ad backwards, starting from the first Tuesday on the floor
Most postings are written from a job description that was written from an org chart. Starting instead from what the person will actually do in week one produces a shorter ad and a better pile.
- 878 words
Two ads for the same job, and why one of them wasted six weeks
A job posting is a filter before it is an invitation. Every sentence either narrows the pile toward people who will take the job, or widens it toward people who will not.
- 1,157 words
A bookkeeper on when an LLC starts to earn its paperwork
Forming a company is cheap and quick, which is why so many people do it a year before it helps and then spend that year filing things.
- 918 words
December is a cash trap and you can see it coming
The quiet week is not the problem. The problem is that the invoices you send in December get paid in February, and you have known this since last year.
- 956 words
What belongs in an hourly rate, and the five costs people leave out
A rate set by dividing a target income by the hours in a working year is short before the first job is booked. Here is what has to be recovered inside the hours you actually bill.