happytales
New member
I have three questions about which I was hoping the small business hive mind might have some insight. 1) Hiring an online marketing firm to help with AdWords, analytics, and online marketing generally, 2) setting up SIMPLE IRA accounts for employees, and 3) assigning roles to employees.
One: For the first question, I worked with a marketing firm I hired on Guru.com. The firm was good in some ways but there were too many people involved in too many different countries (mostly Eastern Europe while my business is in the US). It was like starting from scratch every time we took on a project - and I had to watch them like a hawk to make sure they didn't throw my money away on a wildly wrong search term. Yeah... well... did you, you know, look at my website before you sent me this wrong thing here because this is the wrong city and the wrong business? But they did do some nice work a couple of times - the graphic design was good, the AdWords reports seemed clear and helpful... but I think I'm done with them. You have to understand the client. I'm the client. Understand! And, annoyingly, they kept trying to get me to change my social media to make it all look exactly like everything else they happen to like and be boring, banal, dishonest, and not helpful to the customers. Thanks but, no, I'll keep it real.
So, opinions: put up a bid on Guru or Freelancer or Upwork or Fiverr again? How different are they? Which one is better? Or is there a better way to make contact? Anyone work with a person or a firm to do marketing for a small business with search and other avenues?
Two: a SIMPLE IRA for retirement accounts for my employees. I have 9 employees and just hired a great new guy. He asked about 401K or equivalent... and I hadn't really gotten into that yet. I did a bit of research and decided that when we're first starting out, we should do a SIMPLE IRA, because of the fees associated with a 401K. It looks like there are some pretty good tax advantages to the company and I kind of regret I didn't look into this year ago.
Vanguard has a SIMPLE IRA portal that seems nice. Also, I was annoyed with the brokerages I use personally for myself after the GameStop debacle and Vanguard might have been one of the better ones on that single day of not letting me trade. Thoughts? Set up a Vanguard SIMPLE IRA account for all the employees who are interested and qualify? Good idea? Am I missing some important piece of this puzzle?
Three: the employees drop whatever they aren't sure about in my lap. I am the sole owner, so it makes sense and wasn't a problem a few years ago, as I'm around and can help. But I want it to stop. I want to get out of the routine business of the business in order not to have to be here all the time and have more time to do other things, like start more businesses. For routine matters, I should be out of the loop.
So, I put together a list of all the areas where we aren't doing well and where I think there is too much focus on me. Vehicles. Small machines. Some kinds of client communication that we need to improve. Inventory. Systems checking. Building maintenance...
We had a meeting. I gave everyone a bonus and said at the end of the summer there would be a bigger bonus for anyone who stepped up to take on more responsibility. So if you take a piece, then you get your salary, new benefits, and a bonus at the end of the summer on top of that if your piece of the operation is better than it is now. I asked for volunteers to take an area and be responsible for making that part of the business work with records that can be passed to the next person. We'll have a google drive folder for each area and I will meet with that person from time to time to discuss what has to be done on, say, vehicles. I would tell each person that they have to allocate resources, including their own time and the time of other people, to make their piece of the operation work. When I make the schedule, if they need help to fix something in the building, tell me who and when you'd like to do it and I'll put it down. It's not that the responsible employee has to DO the work. They have to make sure it gets done. So, if I give you a list of maintenance issues, when we meet again, all those items on the list have been attended to. If you need to hire an outside contractor for something, fine. Tell me and we can do that, if you can't do it yourself.
So far, I got volunteers who have worked here a long time. I have a guy here who I think is smart and would be great for something like this but he's planning on leaving at the end of the summer - which is fine because he can set up a system for tracking tools and small machines and vendors and serial numbers, etc, then leave. I'm going to try to get him to sign up for something tomorrow.
I hope this system works. My son, 12, says I should call the jobs stuff like "Master of the Wheel" (vans and trucks) and "Keeper of the Red Door" (our barn has a big red door) and "Lord of the Hounds" for something to do with dogs and give them MTG cards with their jobs.
Anyone got any tricks to get out of the loop? If you don't know what to do with something, up until now, the thing to do is drop it on my lap. I want to get that stuff dropped on someone else's lap. But we're too small to have a hierarchy with a manager role that isn't also a working role. And why couldn't the line between manager and worker be a bit less defined? In some areas, you are the worker. In other domains, you are the manager. That's my idea.
Anyway, thanks for any input.
One: For the first question, I worked with a marketing firm I hired on Guru.com. The firm was good in some ways but there were too many people involved in too many different countries (mostly Eastern Europe while my business is in the US). It was like starting from scratch every time we took on a project - and I had to watch them like a hawk to make sure they didn't throw my money away on a wildly wrong search term. Yeah... well... did you, you know, look at my website before you sent me this wrong thing here because this is the wrong city and the wrong business? But they did do some nice work a couple of times - the graphic design was good, the AdWords reports seemed clear and helpful... but I think I'm done with them. You have to understand the client. I'm the client. Understand! And, annoyingly, they kept trying to get me to change my social media to make it all look exactly like everything else they happen to like and be boring, banal, dishonest, and not helpful to the customers. Thanks but, no, I'll keep it real.
So, opinions: put up a bid on Guru or Freelancer or Upwork or Fiverr again? How different are they? Which one is better? Or is there a better way to make contact? Anyone work with a person or a firm to do marketing for a small business with search and other avenues?
Two: a SIMPLE IRA for retirement accounts for my employees. I have 9 employees and just hired a great new guy. He asked about 401K or equivalent... and I hadn't really gotten into that yet. I did a bit of research and decided that when we're first starting out, we should do a SIMPLE IRA, because of the fees associated with a 401K. It looks like there are some pretty good tax advantages to the company and I kind of regret I didn't look into this year ago.
Vanguard has a SIMPLE IRA portal that seems nice. Also, I was annoyed with the brokerages I use personally for myself after the GameStop debacle and Vanguard might have been one of the better ones on that single day of not letting me trade. Thoughts? Set up a Vanguard SIMPLE IRA account for all the employees who are interested and qualify? Good idea? Am I missing some important piece of this puzzle?
Three: the employees drop whatever they aren't sure about in my lap. I am the sole owner, so it makes sense and wasn't a problem a few years ago, as I'm around and can help. But I want it to stop. I want to get out of the routine business of the business in order not to have to be here all the time and have more time to do other things, like start more businesses. For routine matters, I should be out of the loop.
So, I put together a list of all the areas where we aren't doing well and where I think there is too much focus on me. Vehicles. Small machines. Some kinds of client communication that we need to improve. Inventory. Systems checking. Building maintenance...
We had a meeting. I gave everyone a bonus and said at the end of the summer there would be a bigger bonus for anyone who stepped up to take on more responsibility. So if you take a piece, then you get your salary, new benefits, and a bonus at the end of the summer on top of that if your piece of the operation is better than it is now. I asked for volunteers to take an area and be responsible for making that part of the business work with records that can be passed to the next person. We'll have a google drive folder for each area and I will meet with that person from time to time to discuss what has to be done on, say, vehicles. I would tell each person that they have to allocate resources, including their own time and the time of other people, to make their piece of the operation work. When I make the schedule, if they need help to fix something in the building, tell me who and when you'd like to do it and I'll put it down. It's not that the responsible employee has to DO the work. They have to make sure it gets done. So, if I give you a list of maintenance issues, when we meet again, all those items on the list have been attended to. If you need to hire an outside contractor for something, fine. Tell me and we can do that, if you can't do it yourself.
So far, I got volunteers who have worked here a long time. I have a guy here who I think is smart and would be great for something like this but he's planning on leaving at the end of the summer - which is fine because he can set up a system for tracking tools and small machines and vendors and serial numbers, etc, then leave. I'm going to try to get him to sign up for something tomorrow.
I hope this system works. My son, 12, says I should call the jobs stuff like "Master of the Wheel" (vans and trucks) and "Keeper of the Red Door" (our barn has a big red door) and "Lord of the Hounds" for something to do with dogs and give them MTG cards with their jobs.
Anyone got any tricks to get out of the loop? If you don't know what to do with something, up until now, the thing to do is drop it on my lap. I want to get that stuff dropped on someone else's lap. But we're too small to have a hierarchy with a manager role that isn't also a working role. And why couldn't the line between manager and worker be a bit less defined? In some areas, you are the worker. In other domains, you are the manager. That's my idea.
Anyway, thanks for any input.