When you are growing and scaling in your business, there will come a time when having a team solely composed of contractors and no employees will become a bottleneck in your business. To put in different terms: You're going to start feeling like the side chick, because your business is not the priority of an independent contractor. They have full flexibility over their work, how they prioritize when they work and you can't tell them when they have to be available. 

I’m sharing this, because regardless of what stage you’re at in your business right now, you need to begin wrapping your head around the fact that you should have employees. Grinding and hustling is all well and good, but if you really want to grow and scale your business to the best of your ability, you’re going to need a team that is solely focused on your business. That doesn’t mean that you have to hire seven full-time employees right off the bat, but you’ll need at least one or two full-time team members depending on how you want to grow your business. 

Now I know hiring can be scary (downright terrifying) because I’ve been there. Trust me. But there are so many amazing upsides to get excited about when hiring a full-time team member. One thing that really gets me excited is that, as CEO’s, we have the opportunity to create an amazing work environment. I'm sure there's many of us that have had such toxic work experiences that as CEO’s, we have the opportunity to build companies where we're hiring employees and creating safe, nurturing environments, where people from marginalized communities genuinely feel like they belong. 

I don’t have enough fingers to count how many work experiences I’ve had as a black woman, as an employee who happened to be a black woman, where I dreaded coming to work. And now I'm in a position as a CEO, where I get to hire employees and I get to create a space where black women are thriving at work. And to be able to create that level of change is so exciting for me. 

So the main thing that changed my perspective and encouraged me to hire a full-time employee was that working with contractors was creating a bottleneck in my business. Because I couldn't regulate when they were online, and I needed them to be online, or they weren't full time because they didn't have the capacity to be full time, so we were limited in our capacity.

It came to a point where I had had one too many experiences like that, and I got to the point where I was like “Okay, I'm creating this bottleneck in my business by not being open to hiring employees, let me shift my perspective and think about all of the things I could get done with an employee as opposed to a contractor.” . And when I really thought about it, I made the decision to hire an employee. 

Here are some things that encouraged me to take the plunge and hire an employee:

• I could set certain work hours for my employee.

• I could get quite a few tasks off of my plate.

• With the extra time, I could start expanding on ideas for my business that I hadn’t previously had time to explore.

• I could begin to really solidify the operations of my business by creating SOP’s for my employees to follow and even update if necessary.

These are just a few of the pros I listed when thinking about the benefits of hiring an employee, and there are plenty of others depending on what portion of your business you want your full-time employee to focus on. So, if you’re experiencing a business bottleneck with independent contractors, it might be time to start thinking about bringing on a full-time employee. 

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