The first person you pay

The first hire in skincare is almost always somebody to fill, label and pack, and the act of hiring forces the documentation you have been postponing.

What to hand over first

Filling, capping, labeling, packing and cleaning down. Repetitive, time-consuming, and the block that dominates a production day.

Cleaning in particular is worth handing over properly rather than treating as the leftover task, because in a craft with no kill step it is a control rather than tidying.

What you cannot hand over

Formulation decisions, supplier qualification, and the judgment calls: whether a batch that reads slightly out of specification ships, whether a customer report is a pattern, whether a change needs a retest.

And you cannot hand over anything that is not written down. A process carried in your hands becomes an inconsistent product the moment a second pair of hands is involved, and here inconsistency touches the safety case.

The obligation that arrives with an employee

You become an employer: hours worked, earnings, work-related injuries or illnesses, and the ordinary wage and hour rules. Cosmetics manufacturing is not agricultural, so the agricultural exemptions that apply to some food producers do not apply here.

Record family help too. Unpaid labor hides your real cost per unit and makes the business look more profitable than it is.

Training for a craft with no rework

Two things a new person must understand before touching a batch. That there is no step later that fixes contamination, so sanitation and open time are not housekeeping. And that the written temperatures and sequence are the product rather than guidance, because a preservative added too hot is a product that reads preserved and is not.

Write the process so that somebody competent but unfamiliar could follow it, then watch them do it once and correct the written version where it was ambiguous. It always is.

References