How should your company be structured? This is a very simple question when you are only a one person organization. When starting a new company you should spend a huge amount of time on promotional efforts. As the work comes in, you should still allocate one or two days per week to promote the company.

Many entrepreneurs forget the "pipeline" of work flow. If you spend all your time working on the project you just obtained, then when that project is finished you will probably have a substantial gap of "downtime" while you seek additional work. Remember to constantly engage in marketing efforts so there is always potential work flowing towards you in the pipeline.

As you hire more people (or if you purchased an established business) you should look to focus more on sales and management, while delegating the actual work to employees. This seems hard to most entrepreneurs because they fear that the employees will not do as good a job as they might. The reality is that you are right - most employees won't take the care you would; but to grow and earn more money you need to leverage the efforts of others (employees). With diligence you can keep the quality of work up to almost as well as you would perform yourself.

When slow periods hit, your first reaction should be to delegate the work to employees (rather than keeping it for yourself) while you go out to find more work. Fill up employees' day. This is especially important in a service business, because the personal relationships are the key, not who does the work. If you are the one customers or clients see in an advisory or selling mode, then no smart employee will be able to break away with your revenue base.

As the business builds further, you can eventually delegate sales responsibility to a sales person or two so you can focus more on management and oversight of employees. Think of it this way: if you are doing the actual production work, the company is overpaying you. To earn the "big bucks" you need to be able to effectively leverage the efforts of employees in selling products or services and in getting the work done.

It can be a difficult decision to determine what type of employee you will hire next. In many businesses you may hire a couple "worker bees" while you sell, then pick up a sales person as soon as possible. When you can consistently bring dollars in the door, you can almost always find employees or contractors to get the work done. Therefore we prefer to see smaller businesses bring on sales personnel as soon as possible.

If you have more than one site or more than one shift, you can act as manager in one location or shift while hiring a "manager/worker" for the other location. This is a common cost-saving technique for many small businesses. There is nothing wrong with hiring only a part-time secretary or office manager rather than full-time. You should also work with your accountant or bookkeeping firm to outsource much of your accounting needs. This will generally be more cost-effective to pay an accountant a couple hundred dollars per month than to hire a bookkeeper for a thousand per month or more.

In general, when you add staff, try to focus on production and sales positions. Administrative staff is usually a luxury that few small businesses can afford.