Hiring Your First Office Person: What to Hand Over First

It's 8:15 on a Tuesday night. The crew went home at four, you've been at the kitchen table since six writing three estimates, and the two leads that came in Monday morning still haven't been called back. One of them already booked somebody else.

That's the moment most contractors first think about hiring office help. It's the right instinct and usually the wrong time to act on it, because at 8:15 on a Tuesday you don't have a job description, a price basis anyone else can follow, or a place for a new person to look things up. You have a full head and an empty calendar slot.

Here's how to work out if the hire is justified, what to give away first, what has to stay with you, and what the first month actually feels like.

Tally two weeks of admin before you price the hire

You can't decide this from memory. Memory tells you admin is eating your life, which is true and useless. You need hours.

For ten working days, keep a running tally in your phone's notes app. Every time you do something that isn't selling, producing or supervising, log it with a rough duration. Fifteen-minute granularity is fine. Don't tidy it up.

• Answering calls and texts that aren't emergencies
• Calling back new leads and qualifying them
• Booking and confirming site visits
• Building estimates and writing proposals
• Following up on proposals you already sent
• Supplier calls, material takeoffs, ordering, will-call runs
• Invoicing, deposits, chasing money
• Receipts, mileage, bookkeeping prep
• Permits, utility locates, HOA paperwork
• Scheduling callbacks and warranty visits

At the end of two weeks, total it and halve it for a weekly number. Then draw a line down the page and sort every entry into two columns: only I can do this and a trained person could do this. Be honest in the second column. Most of what you do at 8:15 at night is assembly, not judgment.

The sum of the second column is the hire. Everything after this is arithmetic on that one number.

The decision comes down to four numbers, not a feeling

Number one is the cost. Administrative wages vary widely by market — a part-time office person without trade experience runs somewhere in the high teens to the mid twenties per hour across most of the country, and meaningfully more in high cost-of-living metros. Get a real local read from two or three recent job postings rather than trusting a national figure.

Number two is burden. Payroll taxes, unemployment insurance and workers' comp on a clerical class code typically add 15% to 35% on top of wage, depending on your state and your carrier. Ask your bookkeeper for your actual multiplier.

Say your market supports $22 an hour and your burden multiplier is 1.25:

20 hrs/wk × $22 = $440/wk
$440 × 1.25 burden = $550/wk
$550 × (52 ÷ 12) = about $2,380/month

Number three is what your recovered hours are worth. If you're still on the shovel, those hours go back into production and you value them at gross profit per crew hour, not at revenue. If you're selling, value them in site visits.

Number four is your close rate. Suppose the hire buys you four more site visits a month, you close one in three, and your average job carries $3,000 of gross profit. That's 4 ÷ 3 × $3,000 = about $4,000/month of gross profit against $2,380 of loaded cost.

Substitute your own numbers. If the return column doesn't clear the cost column by a comfortable margin on paper, it won't clear it in reality either, because the paper version assumes the new person is up to speed on day one.

Part-time first is usually the right shape

Full-time is tempting because you have full-time frustration. But the hours you can actually hand over on day one are fewer than the hours you're working, and paying someone to sit through a slow Thursday teaches them nothing and costs you real money.

Start at twenty hours across five mornings if you can get it. Mornings are when leads come in and when crews need answers. Move to full-time when the person is turning down work for lack of hours, not when you're hoping they'll find some.

Hand over the repeatable work and keep the judgment

The mistake is handing over the thing you hate most. The thing you hate most is usually the thing with the least structure, which makes it the hardest to teach.

Hand over work that has a script, a template or a checklist behind it. In roughly this order:

1. First response on new leads — a short qualifying call with five fixed questions and a calendar link
2. Booking and confirming site visits, including the day-before confirmation text
3. Assembling estimates from your templates, with pricing decisions left blank for you
4. Sending proposals you've reviewed, and logging what went out
5. Proposal follow-up on your fixed cadence — the day 1, day 3 and day 7 touches
6. Supplier quote requests, order placement, delivery confirmations
7. Receipts, permit applications, locate tickets, insurance certificates

Items four and five alone justify a lot of the hire. Most proposals die from silence, not from price, and the cadence in the follow-up post is exactly the kind of work that never gets done by a person who's also running a mini-ex all day.

What stays with you: the price. The scope call on site. Anything where a customer is unhappy. Handling the conversation when a competitor comes in cheaper, because that conversation is about what your bid includes, and only you know. Crew discipline. Firing a customer. Deciding the job isn't worth doing.

If you hand over pricing in month one to buy yourself an evening back, you'll spend month three fixing bids that lost money.

Three systems have to exist before the first day

A new office person with no systems doesn't reduce your load. They add a second person asking you questions.

One place every lead lands. If leads arrive in your personal cell, a Facebook inbox, a web form to an email you check at night and a notepad in the truck, there's nothing to hand over. Consolidate first. The speed-to-lead math only improves if the new person can see the lead before you do.

A written price basis. Your five most common jobs should exist as reusable templates with the line items already written. Then assembly becomes a task and pricing stays a decision. Without this, every estimate still routes through your head.

One record per customer that isn't in your head. Property, contact, what was quoted, which version was sent, what they said on the phone in April. This is where ScapesHQ sits — clients, properties, projects, estimates, proposals, send history and a permanent activity timeline on one record that two people can both see. It does not do invoicing, payments, time tracking or crew dispatch, and those will stay wherever they live today. Your new hire will ask about all four in week one, so decide the answer before they start.

If you're still on spreadsheets, read the failure points post before you add a second set of hands to them. A shared spreadsheet with two editors fails faster than a private one.

The first month costs you more than it gives back

Budget for this honestly. Weeks one and two, you will spend more hours training than you recover — five to ten hours a week of your own time explaining, correcting and re-explaining is normal. Weeks three and four you'll roughly break even on time. Somewhere in weeks five to eight you start getting evenings back.

Three things shorten the ramp. Record yourself doing the task once as a screen recording or a voice memo rather than explaining it twice. Write the phone script down word for word, including what to say when someone asks for a price on the call. And let them do the task badly on a real lead while you watch, instead of doing it for them.

Hire six to eight weeks before your busy season, not during it. Training someone in June when you're three weeks behind on installs is how good hires quit in August.

Also plan for the cash gap. You're paying about $2,380 a month from week one against a return that shows up in week six and lands in your account when those jobs get paid — often another three to four weeks after that. Have two months of the loaded cost in the bank before you post the ad.

By day 60 you should be able to prove it

Don't judge this on feel. Pick four measurements before the hire starts, write down today's number for each, and check them again at day 60.

• Median time from lead arriving to a human calling back
• Proposals sent per week
• Percentage of sent proposals that got a day-3 and a day-7 touch
• Your own hours worked after 6pm, tallied the same way you tallied admin

If callback time dropped, proposal volume rose, follow-up actually happened and your evenings came back, the hire is working even if you can't yet trace a specific job to it. If three of the four are flat at day 60, the problem is almost never the person. It's that the systems still route everything through you, and you've hired an assistant for a business that was built to have no assistant.

Fix that, and the second hire takes half as long.

FAQ

Should my first hire be office help or another crew member?

Run the tally for both. If you're turning down work because you can't produce it, hire production. If you're losing work because leads go uncalled and proposals go unfollowed, hire office. Most one- and two-crew contractors discover their bottleneck is sales response time, not shovel capacity, but your two-week tally will tell you which it is for you rather than guessing.

What should I pay a part-time office person?

Wages vary a lot by market, so pull three recent local job postings for administrative or receptionist roles and use that band rather than a national number. Then add your actual burden multiplier — payroll taxes, unemployment and workers' comp on a clerical class code typically add 15% to 35% on top of wage. Your bookkeeper can give you the exact figure for your state and carrier.

Can I hire someone remote or virtual instead?

For phone answering, lead callbacks, proposal assembly and follow-up, remote works fine as long as your records live somewhere both of you can see. It does not work for anything that needs a physical presence — sorting paper receipts, picking up permits, meeting a supplier rep. Split the list from the tally into remote-capable and not, and see how much is left.

How long before an office hire pays for itself?

Expect to lose time for the first two to three weeks, break even around week four, and see real return somewhere in weeks five to eight. Cash-wise it's longer, because the jobs the hire helps you win still have to be built and collected. Have two months of the loaded cost in reserve before you start.

What should I not hand over in the first six months?

Pricing decisions, scope calls on site, price objection conversations, and anything involving an unhappy customer. Your office person can assemble an estimate from a template and send a proposal you've approved, but the moment they're deciding numbers, you've handed over margin control to someone who hasn't seen a saturated clay lot fail in February.

The short version

Tally two weeks of admin in fifteen-minute increments, split it into work only you can do and work a trained person could do, and price the second column against a loaded wage of roughly 1.15 to 1.35 times your local admin rate. Hand over the scripted work first — lead callbacks, site visit booking, proposal assembly and follow-up — and keep pricing, scope and objections. Before the first day, make sure every lead lands in one place, your common jobs exist as templates, and customer history lives somewhere other than your head. Then budget for a month of negative return before it turns.

Book a walkthrough and we'll look at what's actually on your plate that a second person could pick up on Monday.