As I started to get more work than I could handle, I hired one person to help. That worked out well because we had known each other for a long time and had a s

As I started to get more work than I could handle, I hired one person to help. That worked out well because we had known each other for a long time and had a shared history, but it also taught me that I wanted to think very hard before hiring someone else - especially someone who I didn't know before hiring them. Hiring people and managing an agency will feel very different than doing consulting yourself. For me, it meant I now had to worry about getting enough work for two people, and managing cash flow so that I could actually make payroll all the time. For example: before, if I didn't have work then I could just stop paying myself for awhile, and then make up for it by paying myself more when the contracts started coming in again. With an employee though, I had a fixed burn rate (since I couldn't just stop paying him), so I had to manage my cash reserves a lot better. It's a good practice to have anyway, but it took some getting used to. So my recommendation would be to start small - and don't start by hiring someone full time right away. Instead, start by subcontracting some of your work out to someone else. How does that feel? Can you get enough work to keep two people busy? Can you manage your cash flow so that you can pay people on time?