Slow time & employees

A good employee is well worth keeping. During the slow times you need to find things for your employee to do. You can send them out beating the bush to find new business. You may need to be creative as to how you will pay them–meaning you may need to set up a different pay scale for the slower times that will cover both of your needs. This is a good time of year to be contacting new business accounts. Your employee can contact a large number of commercial accounts and set up a bunch of free demos during the slower times. A lot of commercial business comes from being at the right place at the right time.

This is also a great time to look back through your existing customer base and see who you can do upholstery work for. You may want to consider talking to your local movie theaters and set it up to do their theater seats during the next month. You may need to get down and dirty on the price just to get the job. After all you are trying to create extra business so you can pay your employee and keep him or her as your employee.

You may want to consider talking to every Radio Station in your area. Tell them you want to clean all of their Upholstery, and then instead of them paying you money–you will trade it out in radio spots.

As for laying your employee off and letting him collect unemployment–you will need to run the numbers, because if your employees goes on unemployment you are charged a higher rate, but it may be worth it. I think the best thing is to have your operator pounding the pavement to set up more work.

Our first few years that we used an employee, we layed him off in the winter for about 2 months for 2 years . . . it turned out to be a very expensive layoff. Our unemployment insurance raised to be quite expensive and it takes a long time to get the rate to go down. For the last 4 years, we have placed our employee on salary. We averaged his hours and formulated a steady wage for him. It has worked out very well for him and us. Cody’s ideas are excellent and some that we do. If I had it to do over again, I would not have layed him off!

Yes, we average his hours over the whole year. He gets paid the same during the busy summer months as in the slower winter months. Obviously he is working more hours in the summer and less in the winter. This also works well for his monthly household budget. We think if you hired someone as a seasonal (temporary) employee, you wouldn’t have to deal with laying them off. We haven’t tried this yet but have thought it might be difficult to find someone that could pick up other work in the winter when we didn’t need him. Does anyone else have thoughts on this?