Like every small business owner, you are forced to wear many hats. You're the marketing manager, the operations manager, the financial manager and the human resource manager. You perform some of these duties with greater ease and comfort than others. While your business is small you need to meet the challenges of each of these roles. But you must also know when its time to delegate responsibilities to someone else in order to grow to the next step.

First of all, you need to have a clear vision of where you want your business to be. Six months from now; one year from now; three years from now; five years from now. The answer depends on what kind of income and lifestyle you're looking to achieve. If you want your business to produce $125,000 pretax profit, you know you're going to have to set a goal of reaching around $625,000 in annual revenues (assuming a bottom line profit of 20% before owner's salary). If your average cleaning ticket is $85, for example, this would translate to 141 cleanings per week over 52 weeks.

We know from experience most owners can manage the business without any administrative assistance up to at least 30 cleanings per week. If your average is $85 per cleaning, this would translate to about $2,550/week in revenues (about $133,000 in annual sales volume). After this benchmark is reached it starts to make sense to have someone else to whom you can delegate some of the management responsibilities - at least on a part time basis.

 An Affordable Formula 

An operation generating $10,000 a month in volume cannot afford to support a full-time assistant manager. But there is a way you can afford to begin grooming someone for onward growth. Below you will find a table illustrating Number of Cleanings per Week and sample Over Ride Compensation figures. If you have someone in your organization that you feel has the potential to advance beyond the status of house cleaner, this is the type of presentation table you can use to illustrate a great opportunity to him or her.

You will quickly note that this compensation table shows that the plan does not provide sufficient income to support a full-time assistant in your office until the business is performing at least 80 to 100 cleanings per week ($400 to $500 in weekly wages). However, it does provide an excellent incentive for a qualified cleaning person on your staff to supplement their current cleaning wages.

If you have a team leader, for example, who is currently earning $300/week, she could immediately earn a 50% increase in wages even at only 31 cleanings per week. If she proves a valuable resource and helps to grow the business to 120 cleanings per week, she would earn $600/week without earning a dime from actually cleaning homes (other than on a supervisory basis). At 150 cleanings per week average, your assistant would earn $39,000 a year without ever cleaning a home herself! Not a bad incentive for the right individual.

The key to making this formula work without supplementing the compensation schedule is to keep the person on a team until the over ride can provide a decent wage all on its own. However, if you feel you need more of the person's time to help you administer the business, you may choose to modify the program.

For example, if you train your assistant to sell new clients you may wish to pay a commission over and above the cleaning over ride. You can add an additional amount into your first-time cleaning price - say $25 - which could represent an additional $50 or more per week to their pay check.

If you feel it's necessary, you could also supplement her income by adding a fixed weekly amount - say, $100 - to the override compensation. The important thing to consider is that the concept is a way to work the individual into an administrative support position so that it results in a win-win situation for both you and the selected person.

 Incentive to Grow the Business 

When you pay an assistant a straight salary, what is the incentive for her to help you grow the business? Actually, a fixed salary can be a disincentive. If you're paying someone, say, $400 a week, the person may think, "Hey, if there's more business that means I have to do more work. I get paid $400 whether the business does 50 cleanings a week or 150 cleanings per week." The cleaning over ride provides the financial motivation for them to work harder to help you get your business to that 150 cleanings per week objective.

Regardless of how you compensate your assistant, be sure to include that number in your "overheard" allowance when pricing your jobs. And if you're not yet ready to bring on an assistant, this should still be included when calculating your clients' cleaning price to accommodate the expense when you are ready to do so.

Editors note: I am not going to reproduce the entire compensation table that Gary Goranson used in his article. Basically it adds five dollars to an assistant over ride compensation package for each weekly clean your business does. You can do the arithmetic yourself by multiplying the number of cleans you do per week by five dollars to get the amount the author suggests you pay your assistant.

Click here to return to my hints page.