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Good input Ebus_dk...
At one point my mainstream business had 5 employees, not counting my wife and I.
I used ADP for accounting (good fixed price, plus it's a write-off - all I needed to do was call in the gross pay for everyone, and they took it from there, calculating and paying all of the taxes and filing the quarterly reports).
I used Blue Shield for Medical/Dental.
I negotiated a very good deal for phone service (since my bills ran in the thousands per month), by having all the major companies bid on it, and then making the company I wanted all along match the best bid.
Ebus nailed it on the head when it comes to hiring employees. I expected each person to pull in a pretty good chunk of change for the biz, so I treated it as a big decision. Finding self-motivated people that know how to get along with others is golden. The rest you can teach them.
After 9/11, the Marketing Departments of many Fortune 500 companies (our target clients) pulled in the reigns on outsourcing, and as a result we had to change our business to adapt to a very different environment. We gave nice severence packages to everyone, had a tearful goodbye party, and re-invented our company.
We now only hire people as sub-contractors for specific projects. Life is much easier and the company always operates in the black, allowing me to focus more time and energy on my adult businesses, although I miss the comaraderie of working with a group of people for several years (I do almost all of the adult biz myself, although I also hire people for specfic projects).
Outsourcing is back on the rise, however we are continuing with the sub-contrator model since it is much more flexible and entails less overhead.
If you have any specific questions, I would be happy to try and answer them, either here or offline.
Good luck,
ADG Webmaster
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