Rob

I have a problem and I would like to know everyone's philosophy on hiring new employees. I will present my philosophy and if you could, let me know if there are any flaws in it.

I am a quality over quantity kind of guy. The way I like to operate is to hire one person to multi-task and pay him/her over the standard rate. For instance; rather than hiring a customer service person, a sales rep, and a designer I would hire a designer that can do customer service and sales and pay him more money. My partner doesn't agree so he hired people to work in certain departments rather than multi-taskers.

The problem I'm running into is that my employees are starting to rattle the "I want a raise" tree and it's not in my budget to give them raises. I have a customer service department, a prepress department, a design department, and a shipping department. Each with their own employees doing only what that department is responsible for. I pay them what I think is the going rate for that respective position.

My designers won't answer the phones, my customer service people can't design...it's causing small rifts. I want to scratch my entire customer service department and tell my designers and prepress to start answering the phones. I can give them pay raises since they'll be doing more work but it will still be less than paying my customer service people.

I'm having a tough decision on what to do and I know it's a stretch, but get some solid business advice from another business owner.

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