The first person you pay

Finishing is the obvious first job to pay for, and testing is the last.

What to hand over first

Trimming, cleaning, labeling, banding, boxing and order picking.

All of them are checkable by eye and all of them are the bulk of the hours.

Wicking vessels is a good second, once somebody has been shown what centerd and vertical actually mean.

What not to hand over

Weighing and temperature control, at least early. Both fail quietly: a mis-weighed fragrance or a pour twenty degrees out produces candles that look fine and burn wrong.

Burn testing, longest of all. It requires judgment about what a melt pool and a flame are telling you, and it is the step where a wrong call ships an unsafe product.

Hand those over only when the process is written with real numbers and there is a specification to check against.

Making the work handable

A written procedure per task with the numbers in it, not a demonstration.

A reference candle to compare against.

An end-of-run check somebody else can perform and record: weigh ten, inspect against the reference, confirm fill level and wick position.

If you cannot write the task down, the process is not ready, and that is about you rather than about them.

The employment part

Employee and contractor are distinguished by the reality of the relationship rather than by what an agreement calls it. Somebody working your hours, in your space, with your equipment, to your instructions is generally an employee.

Wage and hour obligations attach from the first person.

And tell your insurer, because someone else working with hot wax on your premises is a different risk from you doing it alone.

References