The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Entrepreneurship => Topic started by: fetish on August 07, 2017, 06:41:42 PM
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Hello all,
I have a small business, I profit about $30k/year before taxes. I make uniforms for sports teams in a niche sports community that I'm part of. The money is highly seasonal, with about 2/3rds of it coming from 2 events (one in January and one in July), the rest trickles in throughout the year.
What's vexxing me right now is that I'm at the point where I have to hire someone to help me. I simply cannot emotionally handle the peak workload as well as my day job. However, I don't profit nearly enough to pay someone a fair wage for the amount of work (mostly graphic design work).
Here's the basics: I get orders from customers for custom-designed uniforms. They buy 20-80 pieces at between $30/$40 per piece. Most of the business is on the lower end, 10-15 pieces at $30/piece. My direct cash costs are about $12 per piece - so the margin is good, but the overall volume is both low but also as much as I can handle.
There are people within the community that can do the work, but I find without being able to pay them fairly, they're not super reliable to stay on for a long time, or to complete work on my schedule. Additionally, the community is so small that I can't churn through people (fairly or unfairly) without it affecting my reputation. All my sales to date (about $100k over the years) have been due to positive word of mouth, so I don't want to sacrifice that as well.
What I'd like to do is enter into some kind of profit-sharing arrangement without actually selling a piece of the company, as I think there could be plenty of growth ahead of me (breaking out of my niche sport, for example, into popular sports like youth soccer -- although I feel like I need to master my process "at home" in my own community before going to other sports. Anyhow), but I also know that I can't pay fair rate (~$40/hr) and still turn a profit. I'd say each client demands between 1 and 5 hours of work (for which the standard is they don't pay for).
Any ideas?
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What about college art or graphic design majors?
I've got a friend doing mid-6 figs in freelance commercial design work, and he subs out some magazine stuff to college kids.
I think you can find good ones that are willing to work... for not much. They need experience, which is what you can give them.
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Try Fiverr, find someone you like working with and then hire them directly.