The pitch you tell yourself is that a second body doubles what you get done. It doesn't. They bill fewer hours than you, at a lower rate, and for the first year they take hours out of your day teaching them. Sometimes it still works. Here's how to tell.
Hiring is the decision people most want to talk over with someone. I'll send you your numbers so you have them in writing when you do.
Whether a helper pays is arithmetic. Whether you can keep one is not — and that's the harder half. The book covers what to pay, how to classify them without getting it wrong, what to hand over first, and how to stop being the only person who can finish anything.
The business side of a skilled trade: what to charge, which jobs pay, and what it's worth without you. Twenty-one tools.
Not out yet. The form above is how you'll hear when it is.
Most people work out whether a helper pays by comparing what they'd cost against what they'd bill. Wage times hours against rate times hours. If the second number is bigger, hire.
That version misses two things, and they push in opposite directions.
It misses that a helper takes hours out of your day. You're teaching, checking, and occasionally redoing. Those hours come off your own billable time, and your hour is the most expensive one in the business. Five hours a week of supervision at $140 is $33,600 a year — more than the helper's wage.
It also misses that a helper frees you up. If you're no longer the one loading the van, chasing parts, or sweeping at the end, those hours come back as billable ones. For a lot of one-truck operations this is the real return, and it doesn't show up anywhere in the usual calculation.
A number close to zero means no. Not "marginal" — no. Employing someone carries risk you don't see in a spreadsheet: a comp claim, a slow quarter where you're still making payroll, a bad hire you have to unwind, the fact that you now can't take three weeks off without arranging cover. A helper needs to be clearly profitable to be worth that, not break-even.
A negative number in year one isn't automatically no, either. Apprentices are an investment with a shape: expensive in year one, roughly neutral in year two, profitable by year three when they can be trusted alone. What matters is whether you can carry the year-one loss and whether they'll still be there in year three. If your cash reserve can't absorb it, the answer is no regardless of what year three looks like.
Only if they genuinely are one. If you set their hours, tell them how to do the work, and supply the tools and vehicle, they're an employee regardless of what the paperwork says — and the penalties for getting that wrong land on you, not them. Misclassification is one of the more expensive mistakes available to a small trade business. Worth an hour with an accountant before you decide.
Then run the numbers at two days. Part-time changes the arithmetic favorably in one way — less cost — and unfavorably in another, because the billable percentage usually drops. Someone who's there two days a week takes longer to become useful.
The reliable signal isn't feeling busy. It's turning down work you'd have taken, consistently, for a couple of months — and having enough cash to cover several months of their wages if the work dries up.