Now there are two of them!
I have some exciting news to share this week: ACRL has doubled in size! This has been a long time coming, and one of my goals with this blog is to talk about the actual job of running a business, so I’m going to spend a bit of time discussing why I just hired someone and what the process of hiring someone actually looks like.
Before I go into the gory details, I just want to plug my new employee, Ian O’Gorman! He started doing work for me last Monday as a “Technical Staff Associate”, and I couldn’t be happier. I met Ian at the cloud native meetup in Portland earlier this year, and we’ve kept in touch since then; I was finally able to make him an offer a few weeks ago. He’s done a great job diving in, and he’s already made a bunch of much-needed improvements even just in his first week. He’s currently working on a part-time basis (more on this in a minute), and is going to be helping me out with my CI pipelines and other backend infrastructure, and—SimKube itself, of course (more on that in later posts).
You can read a bit more about Ian in his bio; for the rest of this post, I’m going to talk about what it’s actually like to hire someone, and why I did it.
What is this, a company for ants?
Ever since I started ACRL, I’ve had a vision of having other people working with me; the question has always been “when”. There’s so much work to do, and has been since day one, that even having another full-time person wouldn’t be enough. But of course, I’ve needed to balance that with the reality that supporting employees is a) a lot of work, and b) a very different job than I’ve ever done before1. Everyone I’ve talked to, including my informal board of directors, has told me “Delay hiring someone else as long as possible”. But it’s been two years in, and I finally decided it was time: there’s just too much for me to do on my own. Working for two clients, while also managing all of the logistics of running a business, while also trying to move SimKube forward, while also trying to have a life outside of work, is just too much for one person.
It needs to be at least—three times that big!
My informal board was right, though, of course—actually getting to the point that I could employ another person, from a legal perspective, was an unbelievable amount of work. There’s just so many things that you need to think about: payroll and taxes and compliance; employee policies, time off, sick leave (and for part time people, rest and lunch breaks); business insurance2; company registration (because of course I’m hiring people from out-of-state, because why make things easy on me); equipment; and the list goes on. Basically all of my non-client-work-time for the last… month and a half has been consumed by this process.
So, yea. If you’re starting a business, delay hiring as long as possible. It’s a lot of work.
I was fortunate that some of the leg-work I’d done previously; I converted ACRL to an S corporation earlier this year, which means that I had to start paying myself an actual salary. I’ve been using Gusto for paying myself, and they also provide a bunch of really nice HR features as well3. So that was really helpful to get started.
The much more difficult part was getting an employment contract in place. I’m in a challenging spot because I’m an extremely small business, but I have a bunch of more complicated legal needs, both because I have some big clients and because I’m hiring out of state. As best as I can tell, many startups either a) get their legal team through Y Combinator or whatever, or b) just wing it. I’m not willing to take the risk of “just winging it” but I don’t have the VC funding and network that more traditional startups do, so finding someone who was both able and willing to help me took a lot of effort. To be honest, that almost sunk the whole thing; but I finally found a great legal team to help, and they got it done!
More to life than being really, really, ridiculously good-looking
In the interest of radical transparency, I’m going to talk about pay for a little bit, which is something that most companies are loath to do. But as you probably know by now, ACRL isn’t most companies. One of the policies that we have is that every ACRL employee makes the same amount, regardless of job function or role. This is kindof a wild policy, actually; I only know one other company, the 0xide Computer Company, that does this; and the post that announced this policy got quite a bit of attention, both positive and negative. I think it’s a good policy, and I think they did a great job of explaining why it’s a good policy, so I’m not going to go into the rationale here, but suffice it to say that ACRL pays every employee (currently me and Ian) a $75,000/year equivalent salary.
Now I did mention at the beginning of the post that Ian is part time, which is for a number of reasons: first, it lessened the amount of “stuff” I needed to do to bring him on board—a full-time employee requires even more up-front work (benefits, health insurance4, etc)—and while I definitely want to and plan to offer benefits like these in the future, bringing Ian on board part time allows me to spread out the labor required to make that all happen. But secondly, there are a lot of (currently, to me) unknown expenses with hiring an employee, and given that ACRL is not a VC-funded startup with millions in the bank, I need to be very careful about how I spend my resources. All that is to say that work at ACRL for non-salaried employees is scaled by the amount of time worked, which I think is reasonable and fair.
So anyways, that’s just a quick update both on some of the business processes and a quick introduction to ACRL’s second employee! We’ll be back next time with some more SimKube updates (probably).
As always, thanks for reading.
~drmorr
I make fun of managers a lot (of course always in a good-natured, loving way!) and now I guess I am one.
You would not believe how expensive some of the insurance options are.
Gusto did not pay me to write this blog post.
When are we going to get universal health care in this country???