Outsourcing versus hiring close to home
The conventional wisdom, outlined in The
4-Hour Workweek, is
to outsource your paid labor to India. I can't fault the economic
logic since Timothy Feriss did his homework and discovered that you can
pay an Indian worker chicken scratch and get astounding results in
return. However, I believe that it's worth a slightly lower
profit margin to build a support network and community closer to
home. As a result, we make our chicken waterers ourselves,
using parts from the family-owned hardware store down the road, then
mail out our products from our small-town post office. It's hard
to become a real part of a rural community if you don't have family
roots in the area, but putting our money into the local community has
sped up our acceptance rate considerably.
Meanwhile, our business finally got big enough that it
started to impinge on my garden time, so we decided to hire a
helper. Rather than looking to India for cheap labor, we instead
realized that my mom needed some financial assistance and hired her as
a part time employee. Hiring Mom is a good deal all around --- we
free up some time for homesteading tasks, Mom supplements her income,
and we can write the whole thing off on our taxes. Plus, there
are slightly different employment rules for hiring family members
compared to employing a random stranger --- we don't have to pay FUTA
tax on wages paid to a parent, for example.
Granted, there are a lot
of hoops to jump through when you hire an employee of any sort.
Business.gov has a very helpful page outlining the ten
steps involved in hiring your first employee. It looks really
daunting, but the process isn't so bad if you have an afternoon to read
up on the logistics involved.
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