When Should You Hire Your First Admin or Operations Manager?

The short answer

Hire your first admin person when the phones, bookings, invoices and chasing payment are eating the hours you should be spending quoting, leading or doing paid work. Hire an operations manager later, once the team on the road is big enough that every daily decision can’t keep coming through you.

Why do most tradies leave the first office hire so late?

Most of us come out of an apprenticeship knowing how to do the job and nothing else. When I started Smartfix in 2018 I knew how to be a sparky. I didn’t really know how to do marketing or advertising or sales or admin, answering the phones. I never gave hiring an admin person or an operations manager a single thought.

Most of us don’t. When tradies start out, it doesn’t cross their mind that they’ll need people in the office one day, especially if they want to get off the tools. It’s a hard step up and nobody tells you where to start.

So the owner does it all. On the tools during the day, quotes and invoices at night, phone ringing on every job. It works for a while. Then it doesn’t.

Which role should you hire first?

Here’s the question I ask owners now: what’s costing you the most per hour of your own time?

For a lot of owners the answer is admin or scheduling, ahead of another tech. If you’re losing half a day a week booking jobs, sending invoices and ringing people back, and you’re missing calls while you’re on site, another tech won’t fix that. They’ll just create more jobs that need booking and invoicing.

If the office side is under control and you’re turning away work because there’s nobody to do it, then a tech might come first. I go through that decision for one trade in who to hire first in a plumbing business.

Be honest when you work it out. Write down everything you did last week that someone else could have done. Most owners are surprised how much of it is phones and paperwork.

What does an admin person actually do in a trade business?

At Smartfix the office team does a lot more than answer the phone. Once you’ve got marketing bringing in leads, a sales process turning them into jobs and a team doing the work, you need people to:

• Answer the phones and book jobs in
• Schedule the guys so they’re in the right place at the right time
• Send invoices and chase payment
• Ask happy customers for Google reviews
• Make happy calls after the job

That last one is underrated. When someone from the office rings the customer, the customer will sometimes say things they’d never say to the tradie’s face, like “you missed this” or “it could have been tidied up a bit better.” That’s feedback you can use to train the team.

You don’t need someone from a trade background for this. A couple of our admin staff came to us with no trade experience at all. They had customer service experience, answering phones, booking and scheduling. That’s what the role needs.

What’s the difference between admin and an operations manager?

An admin person keeps the office running. An operations manager owns the jobs and the people doing them: who goes where, what happens when a job goes sideways, how the work gets done to the same standard every time.

At Smartfix the closest thing to that role is my brother Finley Dearlove, our Head of Installations. He runs all the field staff on the road and has a small team in the office taking a lot of the admin strain off him. Fin started with me as a fourth year apprentice and worked his way up through installing, sales and answering phones before he got there.

When I had Fin on the podcast, he made a good point about why the role matters as you grow. With a team of 10 you can ring each of the guys every day. With 35 on the road you can’t. You blink and your day’s gone. Somebody has to own that, and it shouldn’t be the owner.

Today we also have a HR and operations manager, and we run probation periods and structured reviews. For most small trade businesses that’s a later hire. Your first office person will usually be admin, and your first operations manager will often be someone you grow from inside.

If your real goal is getting yourself off site, read how to step off the tools without losing control alongside this.

What has to be in place before you hire an operations manager or admin?

This is where we got it wrong more than once. During our fast growth we hired people without the structures in place, then left them to wing it and wondered why it didn’t work. We hadn’t given them proper training or a standard operating procedure. Fin put it well: we’d put an ad up on Seek without being 100% sure what we were looking for, and hope somebody could fill those shoes.

Before your first office hire, get these sorted:

• A written list of what the role owns. Outcomes, like every enquiry answered and booked, plus the tasks that get you there.
• One job management system everyone uses. We use ServiceM8. Keep it simple. You don’t need a $50,000 system to book jobs.
• Your processes written down, so the new person learns from a document and you’re not the only one who can show them.
• The cash flow to pay them every week, including through your quiet months. Taking on staff means the work has to keep coming in.

Check the award and pay rules before you write the ad. The Fair Work Ombudsman is the place to start. I’ve also written about what to fix before hiring more people and the systems a residential trade business needs.

What happened when Smartfix took on office staff?

I worked from a home office for a while. Once we had five plus staff, I needed somewhere to keep work separate from home, so we rented a little office around the corner from my house. Fin ended up upstairs in that office with me.

By the time we moved to our second office we had around 15 staff, and that’s when we started properly taking on admin staff. The place was set up for three or four of us. We ended up with three managers and five admin people upstairs and chopped the garage in half for more desks. Some of our coordinators today started back then in customer service on the phones and grew with the business.

There’s a warning in our story too. At our peak we had 130+ staff and about $30M in revenue, and we lost money. We were pushing more leads and more quotes, conversion dropped, and then we needed more people in the office to answer the calls. Office roles were growing to prop up a model that didn’t work. We’re about 30 staff now, in one office, and the business makes a profit.

I tell the full story, including the garage and the first office, on this episode.

How do you make your first office hire stick?

Getting someone in the door is half of it. Keeping them is the other half.

1. Do a short phone interview first. It rules out about half the people for us before anyone sits down in person.
2. Interview with a set list of questions. Two I always ask: “Why did you leave your last employer?” and “What pay rate are you looking for?”
3. Plan day one. For us that’s documentation and a run-through of the CRM before anything else.
4. Use the probation period properly and review how it’s going.
5. Have regular check-in chats. I’ve lost a couple of good staff by skipping these. People don’t want to feel like a number.

If you’re weighing up your first admin or operations manager hire and want to talk it through with owners who’ve done it, come to one of my Perth networking nights, or have a look at Hypotential membership.