Ben Roy

So as it turns out, people do occasionally drop by my blog, in light of which I'm begrudgingly going to make some attempt to write something here now and then. It's only been 9 months, what's wrong with that?

I had a mini epiphany on a recent trip to Vancouver (at least, I think that's when it was, hard to remember exactly). By building out a few businesses that are smaller, I've created a fractional employee problem.

That is, I have a need in multiple different businesses for part time employee (or worker at least). This has turned out to be rather problematic. It seems to me that you can rarely hire a great person part time at a competitive rate. Great people can get full time work easily enough, or if they want to rent themselves out piecemeal they usually command a healthy premium.

There's also the issue that the overhead of training and maintaining a part time employee is not significantly less than for a full time employee.

All this has meant that I'm not leveraging my own time as well as I should be due to issues with finding, hiring, training, and ultimately trusting part time help.

There are some other contributing factors which I won't get into now (maybe if I post again next year I'll talk about it then), but the net effect is that I realized that I needed to hire the best people I can possibly find, presumably full time, and then work them into my individual businesses on a fractional basis.

So, that's exactly what I'm doing. I've started looking for a project manager and am working up the job posting for a developer. My hope is that I can deploy this team SWAT-style to quickly capitalize on opportunities as they arise, and to clean up a few of the messes I just haven't had the bandwidth to address.

There's a more sophisticated sounding version of this whole plan which I'll save as the topic of another update.