How To Keep a Staffing Company in Check

How You Keep a Staffing Company in Check, Controlling Budgets in an Ever-Changing Staffing Workplace

The staffing industry is unique in many ways. Not a lot of companies have thousands of temporary employees. Typically if a business has thousands of employees then that business is most likely on the S&P 500 and it is most certainly not considered a small business. Your Employment Solutions on the other hand has thousands of employees, is considered a small business, and is most defiantly not on the S&P 500, yet (you never know).

Growing up my father worked in construction, I worked for my dad from about 9 years old up until my mid twenties. I had a number of other jobs when I was going to college but in those years of working I never realized the costs associated with having employees. Employees can be very expensive, there are many more costs then just cutting a paycheck every week. Whatever employees pay in taxes on each paycheck the employer has to pay the same thing. On top of those taxes there are also federal unemployment taxes, state unemployment taxes, federal withholding taxes, state withholding taxes, to name a few. Not to mention the team of people it takes to pay all the employees and all the taxes.

But wait there’s more. To have thousands of employees for our clients we need buildings, electricity, Internet, computers, software, furniture, cars, cell phones, telephones, printers, fax machines, I think you get the idea.

The perfect reader would now be asking himself or herself, wait, with all these expenses…

How Can Your Employment Solutions Possibly Keep Its Doors Open?

Well, I’m glad you asked! The answer can be summed up in two words, lean and tight.

Lean Business

The definition of lean is, efficient and with no waste. This is the goal with any expense that can be controlled. Take Internet service for example. When I move somewhere new, one of the first things that I do is make sure I have the Internet set up the day I move in. Prior to doing this I shop around with two things in mind, cost and speed.

This is something that we have to consider at all times in our business, what do we NEED in order to conduct business and how much can we afford to spend. This same question is asked about every business expense. We revisit this question regularly to ensure that we are lean. If we are overpaying we are loosing money. If we are paying for something we don’t NEED or use, we are loosing money.

Tight Business

By tight I mean to maintain a close watch on who owes us money and when that money is due.

At YES the employees work, YES pays the employees, then the client pays YES. So, between YES paying the employees and when YES gets paid our money is on loan, interest free to our clients. The more employees we have the more money that we are “loaning” out. If we don’t keep a tight grasp on our money and we “loan” too much of it then we won’t have enough to pay our employees. It’s a nasty cycle that can get out of hand pretty fast if we don’t have a tight grasp on our money and a tight leash on our clients.

In staffing there are large portions of money that come and go everyday. To keep the business running lean and tight, one has to know where every penny is going and when every penny is coming.