Employees and Time Management for small companies

I wanted to write a little about hiring employees, and specifically how to save time and hopefully a little money.

I think we all know that when you're growing or running a small company you end up doing a little bit of everything. And when its a high tech company you're often divided between the mundane tasks that you have to do and the skilled work you need to do to keep your business running. To offload some of the work we hire software developers but taking time to manage and train means I personally get less work done.

So my business partner and I realized we could get ahead by hiring employees to do the non high-tech work.

One of the best things we did for our small software company was to hire a cleaning staff - both for the office and the home. As I know my business inside and out - I'm probably as valuable as 2-3 new hires - so freeing up a few extra hours a week to work on the business is almost like hiring another part time employee. And having a cleaning staff come in shouldn't cost much more than $100 per visit. As a company we spend less than $500 a month to keep our homes and offices clean.

This is an easy way to increase productivity without HR headaches - and this way I don't have to take out the garbage.