Most first hires go wrong for the same reason. The owner knows what they need done but has never written it down, so they end up hiring a person rather than filling a role, and six months later nobody can say whether it is working.

A written job description fixes that. It tells you what to screen for, it tells the new person what success looks like, and it tells you honestly whether the role pays for itself. The wage benchmark that goes with it stops you from losing a good candidate over a dollar an hour, or from committing to a wage your margin cannot carry. Both of them take an afternoon and they save months.

• A list of the tasks you are hoping to hand off, written as plainly as you would say them out loud
• Roughly how many hours a week each of those tasks takes you now
• What this role has to produce for the business. More deliveries, faster turnaround, a clean set of books
• What you think you can pay, and what your margin says you can pay
• Whether the work is hourly or salaried, and whether it happens on a schedule or on demand