There are going to be times when you need help in your woodworking business. So how should you go about getting it? The best answer perhaps is through contractual labour. This is preferable to hiring an employee which can bring along all the hassles that payroll does.
As a one-person business you are going to be doing most of the building yourself. But there are situations where you might need help such as during cutting large sheets for a big project. You might also need help installing your project on the site. You can hire someone for a few days to help you or you can subcontract some of the work.
Subcontracting has its own set of problems but first it is important to understand what contractual labour is.
Contractual labour is when someone agrees to finish a particular job for you for a fixed amount for a fixed price. This person does not walk on an hourly, weekly or monthly wages. It is important to distinguish between an employee and contractual labour because of several taxation issues. If it is adjudged that the person looking for you is an employee it could mean some costly taxation penalties for your business.
So how do you ensure that you only hire contractual labour? Make sure that the person you hire does similar jobs or other people as well. You can even go to a temporary employment agency and they will provide you with temporary employees while handling all payroll related issues themselves.
It is advised that you plan this aspect in advance. When you take a certain project in hand think about whether you are going to need additional help to finish it. Also know at what stage you are going to need additional help. Trying to find someone to help you last-minute could be difficult and result in a possible delay for finishing the job.
Once you have gone through the process of having helped the few times you will probably develop a relationship with some agency you work with or the people that you higher. This will make getting help for consecutive projects that much easier.
We mentioned that hiring contractual labour has set of problems of its own. The main thing that you have to keep in mind is whether you are actually in increasing your overall net income my hiring someone else. As it happens with many woodworkers, hiring an additional person to work for them requires them to spend additional time in training that person.
All the time spent in training and supervising a sub-contractor is time that you could spend building the project yourself and not having to pay someone else to do it.
It is a common situation where a person working for you might not understand your methods right away, therefore always requiring you to monitor the work to ensure that the project goes according to your requirements. All of these factors can result in a waste of time or increasing the number of man-hours that you put in finishing a particular woodworking job.
So while you might get more woodworking work done by hiring another person, you might also end up having to spend more hours working, which means that the increase in actual profit might not be that much.
This does not meant that you should never expand or that you will never benefit from hiring extra people to work for you. We are simply trying to tell you to be aware of the situations that can arise out of hiring extra help to work for you and to weight the actual benefits of doing that carefully.
