Hi everyone,

I've been working as a freelance website designer with a bit of programming skills in Coldfusion and PHP. I started february last year (2003), and so far, I've only got a few clients.

My work requires me, myself, to do the following:
- Book keepings, invoicing, taxation (and other administrative stuff)
- Find potential local businesses/clients (sales & marketing)
- Travel to clients' premises for presentation/meetings
- All the technical stuff such as web/layout/graphic design, programming, managing hosting and domain names, and seo/website promotion as well.

This year, i'm planning to really market my services to local businesses, so I'm hoping (*Praying =) and expecting that I'd get a lot of orders and incoming telephone calls/emails/enquiries, PROSPECTS! :]

So I plan to 'invite' someone into my business to help me doing web development for local small/medium businesses.

I got a friend who's ready to work for me (I'll call/meet him sometime in these few days time to make a deal).
Now, here's what I'm confused about, plz help me.

These are the options I could think of so far:
1. Should I employ him and let him work full time for me, and pay him full-time wages (in turn, this is very2 costly for me, 'coz as i mentioned above that i've only got a few clients, and my business has just started).

2. Or, should I employ him as part-timer, say Wednesday to Friday (so I can arrange all meeting appointments with clients to be made on wed-fri, so my friend will be around in-house for answering calls and doing all those technical stuff while I'm away meeting clients)

3. Or, should I employ him as a shift worker, in other words, I ask him to come to work only when there's a job/project. But with this, I only pay him a part of the total revenue of the project, say 50-50 to be fair. His responsibilities only include designing, programming and developing websites.

4. I believe this may not be the best solution to my case, but here's the best I can think of.
I employ him full-time, but i pay him part-time wages plus commission that comes from each project, say 30% for him, and the rest into my pocket.
His responsibilites will be working as a full-timer in-house, doing only technical tasks (design, programming, hosting, domain, answering calls), and oh yeah, I also plan to get him to meet my clients instead of me in the future.
So all I'd do is all really really only business tasks.

Pls keep in mind that I'm trying to minimise operational cost of my business, in this case, labour cost (since this business hasn't yet been very profitable).

Thank you very much for anyone who contributes in helping me to solve my 'headache'

Cheers

Irvin, I can see a few mistakes with hiring a person full-time at your stage. You're a freelancer, a very proficient one in what you do, since you are ready to take on a bigger slice of a market.

First of all, you have to decide for yourself if you really have that many issues to be solved on a daily basis that you need a full-time employee at the moment. If yes, then go with full-time employee, but I would recommend to stick with part-time, since you are a freelance designer as well. This is done only for controlling issues.

Do not send someone else to meet clients. Do it yourself. Introducing clients to the world of design and programming is not easy, thus a full-time employee would not care to go an extra mile just to keep him, while its a source of your revenue and his wage. Personally, during growth I would want to meet all clients myself just to get a sence who they are, what their needs are. Doing that through a third party is not only inefficient, but dangerous as well, since it is your employee who develops relationships with them and finally can take them away from you in future.

Just some of the ideas.

Good luck,

As Arthashes said, be careful about hiring full time. Let your business grow slowly.

If you really need the help though I think your idea of having him come in on Wensday/Friday is great.