Yesterday I explained how hiring more employees increases your overhead costs, and I went into detail about the hidden costs of having a large staff.

Today, I'm going to discuss other cons associated with hiring and maintaining a large staff in your school. Starting with...

EXTRA WORK

Of course, you hire employees to alleviate some of the burden of work from you, the employer. However, hiring employees brings with it a whole new bundle of responsibilities.

For starters, there's always a lot of paperwork associated with hiring and keeping employees. Someone has to track their time and file their taxes each month, both your share and their share.

Then there's the task of managing all those employees, which is a job unto itself.

Now, if you're a good manager and you have systems and procedures in place for everything in your dojo, this task will be a lot easier (more on that later). But if you're like I was when I started my first dojo, this is going to take a lot of your time until you figure those things out.

Of course, there's also the task of scheduling and making sure everyone shows up to work. And when someone calls in sick, it's up to you to cover for them.

Then there are the interpersonal issues. Employees sometimes don't get along. Personalities clash, or heaven forbid you end up with two of your employees dating and it doesn't work out.

Of course, a good manager can deal with all these things gracefully... but a lot of this also boils down to hiring well, which I'm going to cover later in this series.

STRESS

Managing employees can be stressful, no doubt about it. The bottom line is, some people are better at this than others, and your ability to manage will directly impact the amount of stress that having a lot of staff will create.

There's another side of this that many school owners don't consider when they decide to go big in their dojo. And that is, the stress that comes from having a larger enrollment.

Fact is, when your overhead costs are higher you have to maintain a larger enrollment to pay those costs. Of course, that's the whole idea of having a larger staff, right? Larger staff, larger dojo.

Still, you shouldn't underestimate the amount of time and energy it takes to service 300 or 400 clients, versus 150 or 200 clients. There's simply a lot more customer service work involved in running a larger school. 

Sure, your employees will help you deal with it (that's why you hired them, right?) but you'll still be ultimately responsible for taking care of all those students.

So, by now I think you can see that having a large staff isn't a bed of roses. Like I said, it's not all bad, as hiring and maintaining a large staff does have it's benefits. Even so, you need to decide what type of school you want to have before you start hiring staff. 

If you're just starting out or you're growing your dojo, spend some time now figuring that out, because it's a lot easier to go big than it is to downsize later if you decide you don't want all the hassles and overhead associated with running a larger dojo.