Nice call on Indeed. There are 7 or 8 resumes and probably more that are right in my wheelhouse, so I'm going to try contacting some people in the next week or so. Still debating with myself what the best way to pay them is. I'm thinking as a contractor initially, since as the smallest of small businesses, it probably is best for legal and tax reasons to not have any employees. But then there's the question of paying hourly or salary. My gut says salary, since there will probably be weeks when the work is light and weeks when the work is heavy, and I know if it were me making the pay I'd rather have a steady income stream than feast or famine. Love to get your thoughts on that, since you have a lot more experience than me.
I mean... so we're clear: your company right now is "you and this prospective hire", yeah? Why not leave that open? You may find that the best candidate wants tuesdays and thursdays off and really needs healthcare for her family of four. You may find that the second best candidate is a financial freedom fanatic and wants to be able to shove 90% of her salary into a stack of quasi-legal SEP-IRAs. You may find that your best candidate isn't interested in leaving her current position but since she has no life she'll do your shit as a side-hustle between 8pm and 2am six days a week. At a bare minimum, it's probably time to get an accountant? And ask them? 'cuz the reason my firm got $90k in ERTC while my cousin's didn't is his five employees are 1099s and mine are W2s. We've got a midwife whose pregnancy is going shitty and she can't work as much as she thought... who is also currently working for two practices (long, shitty story). We pay on a W2, they pay on a 1099... which means that while her stated wages with them are only about 20% less than ours, her actual wages are actually about 50% less from them because she's gotta pay self employment tax on 'em. And yeah - she got blindsided by that, which means they got her loyalty for so little that she doesn't quite break even? But that mostly means she asks us how to handle them and pregnancy isn't forever and she'll be back. She's got gumption. We're playing the long game and they're treating employees like livestock. I'll say this: whatever corporate structure you build this thing out as? Won't last forever. But holy shit switching 401(k)s as a company is a cast iron nightmare. You have the room to be flexible right now, so use it.
Always appreciate your advice, my friend. When we started Forever Labs, I hired a payroll company to handle the business end of paying out first couple employees, and that worked really well. In general the reason I don't really like hourly pay is that I think it's demotivating. I want to pay for value and not for time. If my hire can do as good of a job doing something in 6 hours as someone else can do in 8, then I don't see why that person should be punished for efficiency. And of course the converse is true too, that one shouldn't be rewarded for going slow. The way I see it, the labor component of project type work (as opposed to shift work, which is obviously way different) is worth X and that's what should be compensated. But that's just me. I totally get that everyone sees the world differently. I'm really excited to build something form the ground up with no predefined HR policies. Experiment and adapt. Gonna be a ton of fun.
Our compensation is very much shaped by 1) All our money comes from insurance companies 2) who never raise their rates 3) and deliberately hire troglodytes with no idea what's going on to fuck you over 4) while committing actual fraud in their contracting practices 5) and executing cartel behavior 6) to the extent that they threaten you with price-fixing if you compare notes on your contract compared to someone else's up the street We have an entire industry that expects families to pay thousands of dollars a month and then acts like you're stealing from them if you try to use their services. It sucks. PS. Square Payroll works really well until you try to integrate benefits packages. Then it eats shit. We have a payroll company that we switched to because the guys Square partners with (Guideline) suck so hard... but we still pay our birth assistants through Square for simplicity's sake.