The first person you pay

The first hire is rarely a sauce maker. It is someone who fills, caps, labels and packs so that you can cook and sell.

What to hand over first

The bottling line. It is repetitive, teachable in an afternoon, and it is the thing that consumes a whole day of yours per run.

Then market shifts, once they know the products well enough to answer questions. Then packing and deliveries.

Keep the judgment work longer: acidification, the pH measurement, the batch record. Those are where a wrong call costs a batch or worse, and they are the ones tied to your process filing.

Seasonal help is a real job

Production and market season are concentrated, so you need hands for a few months and none in February. Be honest about that in the ad rather than discovering it in September.

Whether that person is an employee or a contractor is a legal question with a real answer, and it is not determined by what you call them or how you pay them. Ask your state labor office before the first payment, not after.

Training that is not optional

If you make acidified foods, someone supervising production must hold the required operator training. That is a requirement attached to the role, not to the business, so handing production to an untrained person is a compliance failure as well as a quality risk.

Plan for that person to be trained before they supervise, which takes time and a course place.

Paying family

Most first help is family and most family help is unrecorded. Record it anyway.

Unpaid family labor hides your real cost per bottle and makes the business look more profitable than it is, which is how people scale something that does not work. Track the hours even when no money moves, so the break-even you calculate is the one that holds when they stop being available.

References