Hiring a Second Ops Person

You are answering supplier emails at nine in the evening and telling yourself that one more pair of hands would fix it. Before hiring, measure the backlog instead. If a queue of orders, claims or invoices has grown for two straight weeks under normal trading, capacity is genuinely short. If the queue clears every Friday and refills every Monday, the problem is scheduling.

Backlog that survives two weeks is the real signal

Count the queue in items, not in feelings. Write down how many orders are waiting at close each day, and what the oldest item's age is. Rising count with rising age means you cannot clear work as fast as it arrives. Steady count with high age usually means one process is stuck, and a person will simply inherit the same blockage.

Then check whether the extra work is permanent. Promotional spikes, a show season and a large one-off contract all look like capacity problems for a month, then vanish. Hiring against a spike leaves you with a fixed cost after the work disappears, the most common way small firms damage their cash position.

A contractor and an employee solve different problems

Compare a part-time contractor against a full-time hire on flexibility rather than on hourly rate. A contractor absorbs spikes, learns your systems slowly and can be paused; an employee carries training, equipment and notice periods, and becomes cheaper per hour only once hours are stable. Match the shape of the work, not the size of the invoice.

Practical move: write the job as three named tasks with a weekly volume attached, such as clearing eighty orders and reconciling two supplier statements. If you cannot name the tasks and the volumes, you are not ready to hire, and the new person will spend their first month guessing what matters.

Automation often clears the queue first

Before you commit to a salary, price the software that removes the queue. Label printing, order imports and statement matching are commonly automatable for a monthly fee well below a wage. Automation skips training and notice periods. It also fails at exceptions, so watch for two weeks whether the remaining work is genuinely human before you post the advert.