Ep. 6: Am I Ready To Hire?

The Unstoppable Amazon Academy Show with Robyn Johnson (Season 1)

In this episode, we talk about hiring someone for your Amazon business. This includes your first hire and some advice for those you are ready to hire more people in your business so that you can move to more of a CEO position and daily task list.

With your first hire, you want to make sure you have thought how long you expect this person to stay in your business, what they will be doing, and what are realistic expectations of their tasks and skill sets. You want to consider what personality types will be happiest in your newly created positions. Two personality tests we love for hiring are the DISC test (https://discpersonalitytesting.com/) and the Kolbe.com test.

Before you post the position you want to make sure that you have started to create the process and the measures for the position. So you know what reasonable expectations for your new hire will be.

You also need to know your worth. Knowing your hourly value it will make the hiring decisions so much easier. This is true not only for your first hire and subsequent hires. We need to not only arbitrage "things," but also start arbitraging time. You want to be clear how hiring will allow you to move towards your long-term financial goals.

One of the things you will want to be thinking about is how can you get more value out of your company's most important employee- you.

In preparing for your new hire you will need to really build out your SOPS (standard operating procedures). Whenever possible you want to make those processes as clear as possible. Creating these processes will also allow you to take a look at your systems to make them more efficient.

We recommend that you keep all of your processes in one document so it is easier to search as you build out your library of processes. Using the table of contents function in work and the header formatting makes this process must easier. We have had some clients that made a separate file for each process and it because very hard for employees to find the right process. If you are in the academy we have a template you can edit.

Gusto is a payroll service we love. Here is an affiliate link we both get a $100 gift card for Amazon.

We highly recommend that you use some sort of time tracking software. Here are three options we love: T-Sheets, Hubstaff, & Tick.

You want to make sure you have the right insurance. In most states, workers compensation is required. You also want to make sure that if they are working at your home, will your umbrella policy cover if your employee gets hurt. You will also want general liability insurance. If your employee will be driving you will want to check out hired and rented auto rider on your policy.

Finally, make sure that you have thought through whether this new hire will be an employee or a contractor. Make sure that you have a clear handle on your cash flow before you hire. It is unkind to hire someone and have them turn down another position and then have to let them go because you did not properly plan for your new hire.

Hiring doesn't have to be scary- but it should be strategic and well thought out. We have a fairly large section of material on hiring in our Unstoppable Amazon Academy. Membership starts at just 49.99 a month!

You can find out more at BestFromTheNest.com/academy Just getting started on Amazon, let us help you begin your Amazon business for free. We have a free getting started guide at Bestfromthenest.com/startfee.