The short answer: hire when the hours you are turning away are reliably worth more than the loaded cost of the person who would cover them. Loaded cost is not the hourly wage: it includes the time they are not billing. If the gap is real but thin, a part-timer is the half-step that tests the answer without betting the business on it.
You turned down another job this morning. Nice client, decent scope, three weeks of work. You said no, because you are already booked out past the point where saying yes means lying. On the drive home you did the math you always do: that was eight, maybe ten thousand dollars that just walked to whoever answered the phone next.
Every busy solo contractor lives in this loop. The phone rings more than the calendar can hold, the waitlist gets long enough that clients stop waiting, and the obvious answer (hire someone) keeps losing to the obvious objection: a helper costs real money every week, and the phone might go quiet.
Both instincts are right. Which is why this is a math problem, not a courage problem.
The only equation that matters
Strip away the anxiety and the decision is one comparison:
Revenue a helper brings in vs what a helper actually costs.
Not "am I busy." Busy is a feeling. The question is whether you are turning away or delaying enough billable work that a second set of hands converts it into revenue. A helper who makes you feel less rushed but produces no extra billed hours is an expense. A helper who lets you say yes to the jobs you are currently declining is a machine that prints margin.
So before anything else, measure the input. For one month, write down every job you turned away, every start date you pushed past the point a client walked, and every hour you spent on $25-an-hour tasks (hauling, sanding, site cleanup, holding the other end) while billing yourself out at $85. That list is the fuel. If it is thin, stop here; you do not have a hiring problem, you have a marketing article to read instead.
The hire break-even calculator runs this equation with your own numbers, including the unbillable hours most people forget.
What does a helper actually cost?
The number on the job ad is not the number that leaves your account. A helper at $22 an hour costs you, realistically:
- Wage: $22/hr
- Payroll costs: employer contributions (CPP/EI in Canada, Social Security/Medicare and unemployment insurance in the US) typically add 7–12%
- Workers' compensation: varies widely by trade and province/state; in higher-risk trades this alone can add 5–10%
- Equipment and consumables: a second set of basic tools, PPE, more fuel, more blades
Call it $26–29 per hour loaded for a $22 wage, before you count the hours you pay for that are not on a job: shop time, travel, the slow Friday. If they work 40 hours but only 32 land on billable jobs, your effective cost per productive hour is closer to $33–36.
That sounds discouraging. Keep going, because the other side of the ledger is bigger.
The revenue side: multiplication, not addition
A helper adds more than their own hours. They multiply yours, three ways:
They make two-person work possible. Some jobs a solo operator simply cannot take, or takes brutally slowly. Sheet goods, stairs, glass, long ladder work, anything where the second person is the difference between one trip and three. Jobs you used to decline become jobs you quote.
They buy back your expensive hours. Every hour a $28 helper spends on demolition, carrying, masking, and cleanup is an hour you spend on the work that actually requires your license and your rate. If your billed rate is $85 and the helper frees ten of your hours a week for billable work, that is $850 of revenue against roughly $280 of cost, before their own directly billable output.
They compress job duration. A three-day job that becomes two days does more than please the client. It means you complete more jobs per month from the same waitlist, which is the entire point: converting the demand you already have into invoices.
Run the honest version for your own numbers. A typical shape: helper costs ~$1,150 a week loaded. To break even, they need to generate about 14 hours of additional billed time at $85, out of a 40-hour week. Most busy solo contractors clear that in the first three days, because the demand was already there, refusing to fit into one person's calendar.
If your waitlist cannot supply those 14 hours, you are not ready. If it supplies double, you were ready six months ago.
The half-step: a part-timer first
The full-time leap fails for a specific reason: it converts a variable workload into a fixed cost. The honest middle option is a part-timer or a regular casual: two or three days a week, scheduled around your heavy days.
This gets you most of the upside with a fraction of the exposure:
- You learn what it is like to direct someone, which is a genuine skill you do not currently have.
- You find out whether your workload is really consistent or just felt that way in July.
- The two-person jobs come off the declined list on the days you have two people.
- If it goes wrong (the person, the workload, your patience), unwinding two days a week is a conversation, not a crisis.
The failure mode of the half-step is treating it casually: paying cash, skipping workers' comp, no agreed schedule. A part-timer is still an employee in the eyes of your province or state, still needs coverage the first time they climb your ladder, and still deserves to know which days they work. Do the half-step properly or not at all.
One more honest option belongs in this list: a subcontractor for defined pieces of work. Subbing out the tile or the electrical is not hiring (they carry their own insurance and price their own work), but it relieves the same pressure while you decide. Just respect the line: a subcontractor you schedule like an employee and supply like an employee is, in most jurisdictions, an employee with paperwork problems attached.
What actually changes about your day?
Nobody warns you about this part: the first hire changes your job more than it changes your revenue.
You become the bottleneck-mover. Your morning now starts with a question it never used to: what will this person do today, and is everything they need on site? An unplanned day for a helper is you paying $28 an hour for someone to watch you work. The owners who thrive with a first hire are the ones who start planning tomorrow the night before: loading the truck once, sequencing tasks so the helper is never waiting on you.
You talk more and tool less. Explaining, checking, correcting. In week one this feels slower than doing it yourself, because it is. The payoff compounds: by week six, the tasks you explained once now happen without you, and by month three you are quoting the next job while this one gets masked and prepped.
Your quality system has to leave your head. Solo, your standard lived in your hands. Now it has to survive translation. The first time you come back to a finish you would never have shipped, the lesson is rarely "hire better"; it is that you never actually defined the standard. Walk the work together at the end of each day; ten minutes of "this is what done looks like" is the cheapest training that exists.
Before you put anyone on payroll, track your own weeks for a month. It is common to discover you were on the tools twenty-six hours in a week you would have sworn was forty, with the rest going to driving, quoting, and supply runs. Half of what you wanted to hire for may not be a helper problem at all.
That is the exercise to run first. The case for a first hire is only as good as your picture of where your own hours go. And almost every solo contractor's picture is wrong in the same optimistic direction.
Know your hours before you bet on them
If you have been clocking in and out of jobs on your phone, the decision stops being vibes. Zeus's per-job timesheets tell you how many hours actually landed on each job, and a month of them added up is the honest denominator. Your week minus that total is the driving, quoting and supply runs, and the gap is reliably wider than anyone guesses. Zeus does not keep a list of the work you turned down, so keep that one yourself for the month. When the clocked hours say you are spending twelve hours a week on work a helper could do at a third of your rate, and your turned-away list says clients are waiting three weeks, the hire stops being a leap of faith and becomes an arithmetic problem you have already solved.
The signs, in one place
Hire (or half-hire) when most of these are true:
- You have turned away or fatally delayed work in each of the last two or three months
- Your booking horizon is past the point where clients stop waiting (for most residential work, three to four weeks)
- You regularly spend ten-plus hours a week on tasks well below your billed rate
- You have two-person jobs on the declined list
- You have a cash cushion that covers two to three months of the helper's loaded cost even if revenue dips
Wait when: the busyness is seasonal and you know it; your margins are thin enough that the problem is pricing, not capacity; or the hours you want back are admin hours rather than site hours. A helper cannot write your invoices, and hiring one because you are drowning in paperwork fixes the wrong drowning.
Frequently asked questions
How much should I pay a first helper?
Enough to keep them, which is more than the minimum you could get away with. In most Canadian and US markets, a reliable general laborer with a vehicle and basic tool sense costs meaningfully more than minimum wage, and the difference is repaid the first month they show up on time with the truck already loaded. Cheap hires that quit or no-show cost you rescheduled clients, which is the exact reputation damage you hired to prevent.
Employee or subcontractor for a first hire?
They solve different problems. A subcontractor takes defined scopes off your plate and carries their own insurance and pricing; an employee gives you flexible day-to-day labor under your direction. The danger zone is the fake subcontractor: someone you schedule, direct, and equip like an employee but pay like a sub. Tax authorities in both Canada and the US look hard at that arrangement, and reclassification comes with back payroll costs. If you will direct their daily work, hire them properly.
What if I hire and the work dries up?
This is why the sequence matters: cushion first, part-time second, full-time last. Two to three months of the helper's loaded cost in reserve turns a slow month into a non-event instead of a layoff. And a part-timer's hours can flex down honestly in a way a full-timer's cannot. If the thought of one quiet month makes the hire terrifying, the problem is your reserve, not the hire.
How do I find someone good?
The best first hires are usually one referral away: other trades who see laborers on shared sites, a supplier counter person who knows who is reliable, a local trade school's job board. Hire for reliability and attitude over polish. You can teach someone to mask a room, and you cannot teach someone to show up. Then treat the first two weeks as a working interview on both sides, and say so out loud at the start.
ZEUS