Purchasing the template, fixing up the flash and coding took you all of last night. You finally finalized your boilerplate Terms of Service agreement and your order with the datacenter for your dedicated server is finally complete. You sent in $40 to have a few animated gif’s made up for advertising, and you finished setting up your merchant account.

 

“This web hosting thing can’t be that hard” you think as you inhale your cup of coffee and your midnight snack.

 

Then it hits you like a brick: You are going to need some employees to help you, and you’ve got to pay them even if you don’t sell a single account.

Luckily, the webhosting industry is bursting with talent, most of which can be bought very cheaply. It’s an employers’ market, as long as the correct strategies are utilized. I’ll outline different ways to find different types of employment in this article.

 

Commission Based Employment

CBE works great for sales positions, and depending on the skills of your employee, this can be a win-win situation for both your new company and for the employee. CBE is a very simple concept: The more revenue an employee generates, the more money (or reimbursement) he or she will receive.

 

There are a few different flavors of this technique.

 

Some employers prefer to get superior talent by offering a flat monthly paycheck just for being an employee, and also offering an additional commission for any sales the employee generates. This works well when employees handle both sales and support, because the flat fee covers the support part of their job, and the commission encourages them to seek out new customers, which helps your company grow. However, the employee is getting paid even if they are not recruiting customers.

 

On the contrary, the most common form of CBE is commission only employment. Employers pay employees only for the sales they generate. If the employee does a poor job and does not bring in any customers, he or she is not paid.

 

Many employees will not go for this, primarily because it isn’t always the employee’s fault that customers are not signing up with your company. A worker could easily put in a one-hundred hour month in advertising and promotion, and if only two small customers sign up, the employee would likely have made much more money working at McDonalds.

 

Commission based employment is prevalent in many other businesses on the net.

 

Those infamous irritating “Free iPod” ads are a classic example. Although people who participate in such schemes are not actually “employees” of the company offering the rewards, they are in essence acting as employees.

 

If participants want to receive a free iPod, they need to get others to sign up for “free offers.” Even if participants spend hours trying to recruit people, they won’t receive any reimbursement unless they recruit a specified number of people.

 

Market Rate Employment

Often the best way to find high quality employees is to offer them MRE, or market rate employment.

 

MRE is the most common form of employment off the net, and is the most traditional form.

 

The employer pays the employee a salary consistent with the market rate for that salary. Veteran teachers in public schools for example, may receive in the neighborhood of 30-40 thousand dollars each year for their work.

 

If the teacher performs poorly, they may be dismissed, but as long as they are employed, they will be paid a specific amount.

 

The downside for e-employers is that the internet can be unpredictable, and they may have to pay somebody even if they don’t take enough money to cover their expenses.

 

Alternative Reimbursement

One of the many advantages to the internet is that you don’t necessarily have to pay for workers.

 

There are countless web designers, developers, and other individuals who would gladly put in an hour or two every day in exchange for webhosting and other services.

 

Always exercise extreme caution when looking to employ people this way. Make sure they are qualified to act as an agent of your company, because there’s nothing worse than to have a bad reputation in an industry where word about problems travels faster than a speeding bullet.

 

In addition, make sure you closely monitor the web space or service you are supplying the employee. It is not uncommon to find a hardcore spammer posing as an aspiring web developer and using your precious server as a base of which to send out millions of unsolicited bulk emails.

 

Your IP and domain may be banned from ISPs, and your paying customers may suffer.

 

It’s your choice

Always remember that you are powerless in finding employees unless you take the upper hand. Don’t let demands of employees scare you, but more importantly never give an employee something they could potentially use against you, even if you trust them.

 

Domain names, passwords, licensing information, and other things that your business cannot survive without must always be in your control. Typing of a spreadsheet of all this information is never a bad idea.

 

Make sure your employees know that although you greatly appreciate the work they do, you, as the owner, are ultimately responsible for what goes on and therefore what you say is company policy.  

 

Never ask an employee how much they would like to be paid. It’s a gamble that if you lose you’ll be kicking yourself later.

 

If the employee asks for more than you are willing to pay, and you deny them, there will likely be tension between you and the worker.

 

Whatever you do decide to go with, make sure you always stand firm in your position. Realize that your decision is/was in the best interest of the company, and it was the best option after evaluating the budget and other figures.

 

 

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