How do you do staff?

[drmike]

I think the best option is to find a person with capital to bring at least 50% to the business and make him manager. People react differently when his money are involved as opposed to just gambling other people money. But I do not see why would you start a business for which you do not have or staff to proceed with?

If someone invests 50% of the value / capital of a company then they are an investor and ideally have deep liquidity to risk.


Workers don't usually do investment deals as part of their job role.  They invest to realize returns.


You'd be very hard pressed to find anyone to take such an offer.  It's essentially handing over their money and then attempting to work themselves hard to recoup their money.  It's like investing twice into the same company.  Only way this works is where the company is actually large and 50% is sold off for way undervalue and there is still a lot more potential unrealized and where the manager is borderline crazy.

 

[Paulius777]

I completely agree with a lot of what you (Drmike) said; I was a Director at UK2 in the past & talk to many owners (well, one less now...), and others in the industry on a daily basis.


To answer the original question, IF you cannot afford to pay someone a salary that is comparative to others in the industry/position, you could look at giving up equity. If you do give up equity, I would suggest consulting a lawyer to discuss things like a vesting period or leave policy, and so on.

I think he can afford to pay salary. As someone mentioned before, you should cut you salary and find some young guy who could work from home as well. Salary +commissions should be a good inducement for higher motivation.

 

[CenTex Hosting]

It really depends on the size of your company. If you can afford to hire a server admin then that would be the way to go. 


If you can't afford that you could look at out sourcing the support.


another option would be to sell out.


Another thing that we do for resellers that are going under is we will take over their account base and set them up as an affiliate and give them an on going commission for those customers. 

 

[ZenithHosting]

I have just started it and i'm playing by the ear.

 

[PowerUpHosting-Udit]

Hosting or any other business requires some serious time, effort and dedication if you want to succeed. I still remember not taking any paycheck for the initial 2 years and lived off myself with the savings I had or took some side designing/development projects initially to take care of my family. 


Even today when we have to do heavy investments on servers in a particular month, I skip on my paycheck and invest that into the business. 


With regards to staff, you have to be extremely careful with whom you are tieing up because you will be working and seeing those people every single day. You have founded the company but your staffs would run your company, so you need to be cautious in terms of how you plan out everything.


If you cannot physically run this business then do not expect your staffs to run it for you. They see you as the leader and will work exactly the way you will be working in the organization.

 

[kevinsimmons]

Well managing the stuff is not as difficult as you thinking.

 

[Hosterbox]

You can find good people online and have them work remotely. Look at the forhire sections of reddit. Some good people on there. 

 

[dedica_manager]

Administrators working in the data center and remotely.
Manager working remotely. Gets Bid +%
Workers can be found on freelance sites.

 

[Hosterbox]

You definitely need a team you can rely on. You can find some good people online and locally. Just start off with a few contracts build the relationship then have them do more and more until you have confidence in their ability at that point take care of them and they will take care of you. 

 

[nouptimehost]

For technical issues - I assume that you have a good knowledge of the industry and can handle level 1 and 2 support for your customers. If you lease a server from a provider who also offers end user support for some additional fees, you can place ticket to the provider and get the issue resolved and update your customer. Or if you can hire someone that would great option.

 

[ChuckC]

The first bit was pretty tough, bit being 12 months. Essentially I was a 1 man show during that time as far as support and server management went. 7 am until 9 pm I was pretty much always available for any issues or tickets 24/7. I opened a "Red Alert" support department that tickets went straight to my phone and override my volume settings, only to be used if a site was down. Normally I already knew as our monitoring systems also have the privilege of overriding my volume.

That time was a time of very little sleep. But we made it and made it pretty well until the point where we could bring somebody on to give a hand with tickets which has been awesome. For staff, I actually found this person through contact with our customers, and it has turned out to be a great recommendation. One of the reasons why we maintain a Slack chat for staff and customers, some great and fun things come from it.

He started out on a pay per ticket basis which was $10 per ticket resolved and $5 per ticket that he was was unable to resolve due to not knowing or lack of access. From there it has evolved to part-time hourly.