Employees are often the most expensive part of any operation, especially for small businesses. Searching for the right candidate, hiring, training, firing and looking for a replacement are difficult, time-consuming tasks.

The Costs of a Good Employee

When you add up the financial resources they need – competitive salaries, benefits, holiday, sick and vacation pay, matching taxes, employment insurance, liability and other overhead like office space and equipment – those costs can really stack up.

With these expensive employees, you are also paying for their breaks and downtime. Internet shopping and errands. Social media and job fatigue. What is it, like 5 hours of productive work for an 8 hour work day?

Still, good employees are worth it. But they often get stuck in the same mode of thinking, bored and de-motivated. Office politics and self-interests can also be an issue. Often, they don’t have all the skills they need to grow the business or complete project.

It’s time to get some new blood in the organization.

Hire a New Employee

As said above, employees are expensive. New employees are even more expensive. They take time and resources to train, understand the business and their position to work efficiently. The interviewing process – from creating a job description to posting the listing, weeding through resumes, setting up and conducting interviews.

Temporary Employees Through Staffing Agencies

These can be great for accounting positions or even lead generation programs. Whether it’s a leave in absence or testing out a new initiative, the types of employees available for temporary positions are often entry level or not of top caliber. Not always, but typically. People change and grow – so don’t ever stop giving those opportunities.

It’s important to keep in mind, whatever the temp employee is paid, you have to pay the staffing agency a fee on top of that. This fee is typically 20-70% markup, so if the employee is paid $20 an hour, or $40k, which isn’t much, the staffing agency (employer) is getting paid $24-34/hour. This would be the fee you’re paying for the staffing agency to take on all the employment fees and benefits.

Source: Trading Economics on March 9th, 2023

Hiring a Marketing Manager Professional

The cost of hiring a Marketing Manager is $35/hour plus benefits, or $70k a year. The fee to the staffing agency would be starting $42 to $60 an hour for a temp to hire employee. You may not need a full time marketing manager, but most marketing managers want full time employment.

If you want someone that is more established in their career, you’re looking more at head hunting a permanent, more expensive employee, often taking them from another employer. They typically want a full time position with excellent benefits.

Augment Your Existing Employees

Since we know the value of our good employees we should take care of them. Often, they are overworked and underutilized at the same time. Augmenting your existing team can increase their productivity

Helping Your Marketing Department

You can hire contractors or outside agencies. Typically, a marketing agency charges $125 an hour or more (found this out researching my competition). Rule of thumb is to charge 3.5 times your employees’ hourly rate to stay in business. $35 x 3.5 = or $122.50 per hour using the above example – looks like they did their research too.

Marketing agencies typically do top tier work, highly specialized corporate advertising phenomenally well. They have full time employees specialized in individual marketing roles – website development, email marketing, content creation, social media, graphic arts, writing and account management.

Our agency offers marketing services currently at $65/hour as we are owner – operators and a network of independent marketing professionals that are ready to invigorate your organization with new ideas and solve tough problems.

Hiring a Business Consultant

If you hire a small business consultant they can review and improve your current business operations, making your employees more productive. They can do this by making workflows more efficient, setting up business processes with automation and software, or working with other services on tasks that slow your employees down.

We offer affordable business consulting services designed to make your company more efficient. We work your current team to make your sales and marketing processes more efficient. See the current suite of New England Marketing & Efficiency services for small business here.

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