I currently have 4 techs and based off of my rough estimate I have a booked job list of about 9 weeks worth of all the techs being used. Some jobs are more urgent than others and I am falling behind. But on the other hand, I don't want to overhire and then not have work for the workers.
As time goes by, I should be hopefully signing on more jobs, but I don't have any guarantees. I dont have a set sales system in place, so jobs come more word of mouth.
So do I hire or not?
Thanks
#1, thanks for sharing.
My only advice is to if you hire a new tech, make sure you are confident it is a good tech. If you have any question about how good the tech might be, don't hire as a new underperforming tech when you are already so busy will just be more draining.
Related, do you have any good prospects for a new tech?
We are in a similar situation, 3 installers and one service tech.We are in the process of hiring another service tech. What a chore.
I delayed the 2nd service tech by a couple months and we are paying the price. We have 20+ open tickets and are 7+ days out on service calls. I have pulled an installer to do service calls to help catch up. But that slows production, big project invoicing etc. So it's a real rock and a hard place.
Only you know your pipeline and forecast, what may come up, etc. It also depends on finances and cash flow. Can you swing another tech? Keep in mind when you hire them, your 9 weeks is going to go down,so you will need more projects to feed the beast.
You may want to hire helpers, people that can be trained, then move up. Our installs are a lot of labor, cable pulling, conduit, etc. So helpers can be broughton and productive in a few weeks.
That helper comment makes good sense. Get some guys in to assist, but also get experience, training and know how at the same time. Kind of like an intern.
Another option is to hire a subcontractor to help with cable pulling at a minimum. Sometimes you can find an electrical that can pull the low voltage cabling and even mount devices. Just getting the cable pulling done can help you catch up quickly with your backlog. You just need to make sure and vet who you use and that they aren't ones to try and steal your customers. If you put a subcontractor agreement in place then that helps eliminate that.
Good luck to you.
This is precisely what we have done. In our case, we hired a company that strictly does cabling. This, funny enough, has created an agreement between the two companies where we feed each other work - any security work that comes up goes to us and any cabling work we are asked to do goes to them.
Everyone marks the other guy up 15% and we all win.
Best of luck with growing the company, having 5 people already is a great achievement!
Shannon has a great point. In my previous life as a systems integrator we would frequently hire sub labor to do the easier but more time constraining work such as running cable. We would then use our in house senior techs to do the smarts of the project. By this I mean programming of the systems and configuring of the hardware that normally caries certification requirements. Another option is to also partner up with other smaller systems integrator's and work to tackle projects together. This has worked for me as well on a national basis where we shared the PIE with one another. You can find countless integrator's on this map IPVM created. List of Integrators
Also if you can find a good electrical to work with oftentimes you can develop that relationship to work both ways. When you have a need for help and use them as your first choice then it doesn’t take long for them to bring you in on projects they come across as well. You just have to build that trust and not just a one and done deal.
Many times electricals have solid relationships with customers just as you do. Their customers will often express pain points with their security systems and the electrical really would like to help but perhaps they can’t really do all that you do. In this case you provide the solution and parts. They install the equipment they can and you do the rest. Everyone wins at that point.
Here's what I've done in the past and it worked much better than sifting through hundreds of resumes, then interviewing 30-50 to find *one*: Find an IT staffing company that is enthusiastic about learning the unique parameters that define a security tech. Teach them your values for this position. Let them use their processes and labor to filter out the bottom 95%. You'll review 10-15 resumes, interview maybe 5, and really like most or all of them. "Hire" one through them. Yes, your hourly cost for six months is more to pay the staffing agency, but the time you saved not reviewing bogus resumes, or scheduling 10's of interviews, plus the ability to *easily* terminate a bad hire in that six months makes the cost a no-brainer. At the end of six months, if you love them (and have work) then bring them on board and your hourly costs go back to normal.
I would explore a different approach, at least to help make up your mind.
On your next few jobs, increase your labor rate by 10-15%. Can you make more money with the same crew? Can you find customers that are less price sensitive, and thereby hopefully move you into a slightly higher caliber of work.
Generally speaking, I would prefer to keep employee count as low as reasonably possible.
Generally speaking, I would prefer to keep employee count as low as reasonably possible.
I created a new discussion to expand this topic: Better To Be A Smaller Or Bigger Integrator?
My opinion, based solely on something that was touched on but not discussed much.
Above, UD#2 suggests that you hire a "helper" to assist with cable pulling and other tasks that may not require a specialized technician to do terminations or programming, etc.
While it's hard to say definitively what the right answer in your scenario is, to me, the clearest answer for building a business as a whole is to do what UD#2 suggests and hire a helper, but with a clear development plan to become a technician over time.
The really unfortunate reality of the security industry is that there is a huge shortage of really high-quality technicians, and I believe that to be because there is a huge shortage of any type of apprenticeship or learning programs in the industry as a whole. All too often, mediocre technicians tend to bounce around from company-to-company, and as every company begins to scale, they start to be full of them.
I would implore integrators to focus on in-house training and development of technicians instead of always trying to hire "ready-made" guys from outside. In almost all cases where a business is growing, there will have to be outside hires, but when you consider the long-term gains that companies will realize by going this route, it becomes a no-brainer. Finding the right people that want to build a career and molding them in the way that they should be molded is a way to not only make A LOT more money in the long-run with these technicians, but also to ensure that your quality standards are being met, which will only help your business in other ways as well.
At the end of the day, this also seems like the perfect time to be hiring a person like this, because they are effectively going to make your current technicians more efficient. There will be an initial training/adjustment period where it will be subtraction by addition, but after a few days and they start to get into the swing of things, they will slowly start to add value, and hopefully within a few weeks will steadily be adding more time back to your technicians.
Just my $.02.
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