employees

Two weeks ago, we hired our first employee, Beth Topczewski. This week, we hired Rebecca Rothschild, who had been helping out for free anyway. We had initially planned not to hire anyone until the store opened, but we realized that it was probably cheaper to pay our employees to help us open earlier.

Having Beth and Rebecca around is awesome. Their presence encourages us to think about how we are using time. We used to show up, think of some things that needed doing, and do them. Now we think “what are the  things *we* (i.e. the owners) need to do,” then have employees do other tasks. It’s hard to deal with adminstrative stuff when you’re covered in bits of polyurethane, crawling into corners with a caulking gun trying to seal every last crack.

Oh, and Beth and Rebecca are cool people. I’ll give them blog accounts so they can post.

We’re paying each of them $7.75 per hour, which is minimum wage in Illinois. We intend to raise this to $10.50 per hour when we are profitable (ha).