I want to hire someone. Specifically, I want to hire a programmer who also has good editing skills. This programmer is going to be referred to in this post as “he” due to overwhelming stereotypical majority, and because I don’t want to continue mangling my sentences using gender-ambiguous terminology.
Anyway, this person (“he”, remember) will have the job description of spending a portion of his time on production (i.e. at least printing and mailing letters, and probably doing proofreading and customer interaction as well), and the rest of his time working on new and existing software programs.
There are a few reasons to split the job description up like this, rather than hiring a pure-and-simple production person:
The most basic is that I don’t yet have enough work to keep a production-only person busy all the time, and the work isn’t quite predictable enough for a regular part-time person (though it could work, if need be).
I also have a ton of programming ideas that I want to pursue, and even if I were to pick the top two or three, it’s more than I can handle alone.
I think it’s important to have programmers interacting directly with customers, so as to get better products.
Going from a one-person business (plus Christine) to a two-person business, though, drastically changes the playing field. Immediately, three avenues of work and thought open up:
Space. I’m currently operating in a space that isn’t at all suitable for two full-time people, so the business will need to move (again) before I can hire someone.
Paperwork / Legal Stuff. It’s really easy to run a one-person business. You just kinda do it, and file one extra form with your taxes (at its most simplistic). Payroll, insurance, any HR-related stuff, zoning restrictions, etc. all come into play as soon as employee #1 gets involved.
Hiring. I need to find someone who would like to and is qualified to work for me. In my mind, what I’m doing is far more interesting and rewarding than doing something trendy like working for Google, even if the pay isn’t quite as good. It’s also not very common to be able to get paid to help people advance the Gospel (most missions organizations require you to raise your own salary, and for your typical introverted programmer, this is more an exercise than most in trusting God to provide). But unless people know about the job, it doesn’t matter how interesting it is. And even once people know about the job, if they think that Perl is a misspelled piece of jewelry, well, they’re probably not going to thrive here. So a large part of this process also involves interviewing.
There are other things that need to happen (like, say, getting another desk, computer, monitors, etc.), but those are three biggies.
For this post, I’m going to completely ignore #2 and #3, and just focus on the space issue, since it’s been eating up almost all of my mental energy for some time now.
The Humble Abode
Except for a six-month stint in some rented office space, I’ve enjoyed the privilege of working from home. For some people, this is apparently not a good thing — it can have its drawbacks. But I love it. I’m able to spend a lot more time with Christine, and she’s able to help with the business, without requiring a commute. We only have to pay for one set of utilities rather than two, the rent works out to be cheaper than renting both a house/apartment and office space, and we get to live in a nicer house as a result of combining the two.
The separate rented office space wasn’t a bad thing, either, and I wouldn’t terribly mind going back to it if it were economical, but my preference would be to continue running it as a home business (or a workshop-type scenario on the same property).
If I add an employee into the mix, though, it gets trickier. I want to give him his own office, without requiring him to trek through the house. Kitchen and bathroom space is also something that I want to be separate, both for his sake and ours.
That’s not possible where we’re living now. The only other potential office space is right next to our bedroom, for one thing, and that’s just awkward.
So, we’re looking at moving, and either buying a place or building something. Either way, my goal is to have the business take up a full, walk-out basement with its own entrance and driveway, bathroom and kitchen area, and have the house be on the main level. That way, it’s effectively its own building, indifferentiable from a rented office space, but it’s also a home business, so we get the savings of being in only one place rather than two, and the unbeatable commute.
Neigh-bors
Also factoring into this decision is that Christine wants a horse. More specifically, she wants three horses, pasture, a riding ring, a barn, riding trails, and I’m pretty sure an indoor arena wouldn’t go astray, given the climate. But we need to start somewhere.
Therefore, in addition to the walkout basement, we’re looking for a parcel of land that’s at least five acres. It needn’t be horse-ready, though that would definitely be nice. Horses aren’t acceptable business expenses in my line of work, so that would be coming out of our personal budget, which isn’t going to support a horse yet. The land just needs to be suitable for when the time comes, so as to avoid another move down the road if we can help it. It should also be in an area with other horse-owners nearby.
Power-Hungry
This one is much less of an issue with newer homes, but my equipment uses a good chunk of power. Thankfully, nothing requires three-phase, so a standard 200A main panel is enough to run everything, including planned additional equipment for the foreseeable future.
200A panels seem to be a relatively recent phenomenon, so most older houses are probably not going to be under consideration (particularly if extensive rewiring would need to be done — there are a surprising number of houses around here that are still on two-prong sockets).
Death and Taxes
If we move 20-30 minutes away from where we are now, we can get out of the fast lane (relatively speaking), and should be able to pay significantly less per month than we’re paying now for rent. Property tax also goes down significantly, as long as we avoid a few towns (like Claremont, where the so-so house we were looking at had annual taxes due that were greater than our annual rent at our first apartment out of college).
It looks like there are four or five towns that are close enough to the White River Junction post office to allow for regular trips there, but far enough to escape the inflated housing prices around Dartmouth and DHMC.
Slim Pickings
With that rather odd set of requirements, plus a few others like reliable high-speed Internet access, there’s not exactly a whole lot available, buyer’s market or not.
Specifically, I found exactly one house that met all of those criteria while still being in our price range, and it unfortunately already has a buyer. I’m hoping it falls through, but it doesn’t look like it will. Perhaps the realtor I’ve contacted will have more suggestions.
Oh, Build Me A Home
An alternative would be to buy an open plot of land, and build a house on it. That way, I could specify exactly what we want, and we wouldn’t have to worry about trying to fit everything in an existing footprint that wasn’t designed with a full mail service provider in mind.
That may even end up being cheaper, but it’ll definitely take longer than buying an already-built house. If I want to hire someone next spring (i.e. graduation season), I think “creative” is the word that would describe the working arrangements if the new house isn’t done yet (“umm, I have this trailer. It’s really nice. Air conditioned, even. You’ll love it.”). More likely is that I would suggest he go on a summer missions project and have him start after that.
Where Was I?
Oh, right, all of this is a result of wanting to hire someone. And that’s just one of the things that needs to be done first. Given that, do I really want to hire someone, or just stay here for a while longer, solo?
Yes, I do want to hire someone, if it’s at all feasible. A lot would have to happen in the next 6-9 months. A LOT. And the finances are a significant issue right now — the business is finally past the stage where I’m constantly investing all of the profits in new equipment to keep up with growth, but it has only been past that stage for a few months, so while affording the house isn’t a problem (especially since there’s a decent chance our monthly payments will go down), convincing the mortgage lender of that will require some understanding on their part, and not just computer formulas and previous two years’ tax returns.
On the other hand, even though waiting a year would put us in a much better position financially, it’s a year during which very little development would happen, because an increasing amount of my time is being spent on production. Plus, if the business continues to grow at anything near the pace it has been growing since it started, I’m going to have even less time to work on the logistics of moving, hiring, and so on next year.
It’s crazy how one seemingly simple decision can have so many ramifications.
