Before You Hire Another Employee, Read This

Good employees are hard to find but before you hire another one, it might be worth figuring out how much of your existing team’s time you’re giving away.

Five employees losing 30 minutes a day to unnecessary work adds up to roughly 625 hours a year – more than 15 full workweeks.

Take a good estimator. You hired that person for judgment: damage analysis, repair planning, OEM procedures, estimating-system knowledge and the thousand little decisions that come with experience.

Now consider how much of the day is spent on duplicative or unnecessary tasks.

They are small things that rarely look serious enough to fix. But 10 minutes repeated across people, repair orders and hundreds of working days creates real capacity.

So how do you find those time leaks? Start with a one-week audit focusing on these five tasks: searching for information, copying data between systems, chasing an answer, checking a portal and re-entering information that already exists somewhere else. Tally every time someone in the front office has to do one of them. At the end of the week, see where the marks accumulated.

Then attack the biggest category: eliminate what isn’t necessary, simplify and standardize what remains, and automate repetitive work where software can reliably help. Then decide whether you still need more labor.

Use the same test for technology. Instead of asking how many features a product has, ask: How much time does it save, and how much money does it save or earn?

Once you’re asking the right questions, you can make sure your shop is running efficiently and getting the most out of every minute.

You might need to hire another person. But first make sure you don’t have twenty 10-minute problems masquerading as one 40-hour problem.