It usually starts with a call you don’t want to make. Someone rings about a job you’d happily do, and you hear yourself saying you can’t look at it until March. Third time that month. Meanwhile you’re quoting at ten at night, because the day belongs to the tools.

The obvious answer is another pair of hands. The uncomfortable part is that help is the point where your name stops being entirely in your control — and plenty of one-van trades have grown into a two-man outfit that turns over more and earns less. Here’s how to judge the timing, and how to avoid both.

General guidance, not employment-law or tax advice. Employment status, PAYE and the rules for paying subcontractors are genuinely technical and the figures change — check gov.uk and speak to an accountant before you take anyone on.

The signs you’re actually ready

Being flat out isn’t the signal — every self-employed trade is flat out in May. What matters is whether work keeps arriving when you’re not chasing it, and whether there’s margin in it to pay someone from. Three things genuinely point to ready:

You’re turning down work you’d want, repeatedly, over months. Not one busy spell — a pattern where enquiries you’d happily take go elsewhere because of your lead time.
You’re the bottleneck, not the work. You’re doing the second fix and the labouring and the skip run, and the job runs three days long because one person can only be in one place.
Your prices are right. If you’re busy because you’re the cheapest in town, another body just multiplies a thin margin. Sort the pricing first; standing out from cheaper competitors is the better problem to solve.

And one sign you’re not: a single big job you’ve bitten off. That’s a reason to bring in a subbie for a fortnight, not to take on a wage.

Be clear about what you’re buying, too. Help doesn’t hand your evenings back — it buys capacity and takes some of your attention in exchange, because now you’re supervising, programming work and answering someone else’s questions at seven in the morning.

Subbie or employee? The high-level difference

These are two different commitments, and you don’t get to pick the label for convenience — the reality of how the person works decides it.

A self-employed subbie is in business on their own account. They typically carry their own insurance, provide their own tools, invoice you, decide how they do the work, and can turn down a week. You’re buying days as you need them — no payroll, no holiday pay, no commitment past the current job. For most trades taking on help the first time, this is where it starts.

An employee works for you — set hours, your instruction, your kit, paid through PAYE with holiday, statutory entitlements and pension duties attached. More commitment and more admin, but you get continuity: someone who learns how you work and is still there in February.

The trap is the middle ground. If someone works only for you, every day, when you tell them to, using your van and your tools, calling them a subbie doesn’t make them one — HMRC looks at the substance of the arrangement, not the invoice, and getting it wrong lands on you, not them. This is exactly where an hour with an accountant pays for itself.

Two things people miss:

Paying a subbie for construction work probably makes you a contractor under CIS, with registration and monthly filing of its own. If that’s new, CIS explained for subcontractors covers the scheme from both sides.
Check your insurance before anyone turns up. Public liability generally won’t cover an employee’s injury, employers’ liability is a legal requirement once you employ, and many policies treat labour-only subbies as your employees for cover purposes — so ask. What insurance tradespeople need has the plain version.

Price their day in properly, or you’ll work for nothing

This is where the money goes. You pay a subbie their day rate, bill the customer a bit more, and assume the difference is profit. It isn’t — not until you’ve paid for the time you spend on them.

Say you pay a subbie £200 a day; your figure will differ by trade and region, and so will theirs. Before deciding what to charge for that day, add:

Your supervision time. Setting them up, checking the work, answering calls — half an hour at each end of the day is realistic at the start, and it’s time you can’t bill elsewhere.
Their slower start. Nobody is at your speed on day one in your way of working.
Rework. Budget for some — going back to re-make-good a patch is unbilled time twice over.
The overhead they add. More materials runs, consumables, possibly a second vehicle or another set of hire kit.

On that illustrative £200 day, charging £220 is a loss once you’ve given them an hour of your own. Something nearer £280–£320 is the sort of number that leaves margin — but work out your own rather than borrowing mine. The test is simple: after paying them and accounting for your time on them, are you making more per day than you did alone? If not, you’ve bought a bigger business and a smaller wage.

Two practical rules:

Quote the job, not their hours. Price the work at what it’s worth to the customer, then decide who does which days inside it. Quote labour at cost-plus-a-bit and you’ve capped your upside at whatever their rate is; how to work out your day rate is the method to run it properly.
Agree their rate and what it covers in writing before day one. Day rate or price-work, start time, who provides what, whose van the waste goes in, what happens if it’s rained off, and when you pay. “We’ll sort it” becomes an argument on the Friday.

Finding someone who won’t damage your name

Your reputation is the asset you’ve spent years building, and you’re about to put it in someone else’s hands for eight hours a day.

What actually works: ask the trades you already work alongside. The plasterer or sparks you share jobs with knows who’s reliable and who’s a liability, and won’t recommend someone who makes them look bad. Merchants hear everything. Local trade groups turn up people, but vet hard — and a quiet word with someone’s last two customers or contractors tells you more than any certificate.

Check the dull things before the skills: do they turn up, and on time? Can they talk to a customer in their house without causing an incident? Will they tell you when they’ve made a mistake, or hide it until you find it? Skills can be taught in weeks; none of those three can.

Then trial them — a week on something low-risk, like a garage, a rental turnaround or second-fixing a job that’s already going well. Pay properly for it and keep the commitment short and explicit on both sides.

The quality-control risk, and how to contain it

A customer doesn’t care that the silicone was done by someone else. It’s your quote, your invoice, your Google review. So for the first few months:

Don’t put a new person on your best job. Start them on overflow — the work you’d have turned away anyway, where a slow week costs you nothing you had.
Split by task, not by trust. Give them work where mistakes are visible and cheap to fix — strip-outs, prep, labouring, first fix under your eye — and keep the bits the customer looks at, and the bits that leak, to yourself until you know them.
Check at the end of every day, not the end of the week. A bad day caught at four o’clock is an hour’s correction; the same thing found on Friday has been built over.
Introduce them, and say who’s in charge. “This is Dave, he’s working with me on this, I’ll be here Monday and Thursday” prevents both the call that starts “there’s a man in my house” and the customer handing him unpriced extras directly.

The takeaway

Take on help when the work is consistently more than you can do and your pricing leaves room to pay someone from it — not because one month was brutal. Start with a subbie on overflow before you commit to a wage, and settle the status question with an accountant rather than with what someone told you on site.

Then do the arithmetic honestly. If selling their day doesn’t earn you more than a day on your own did, the growth is costing you money — and the fix is your prices, not another pair of hands. Check the work daily until you’d trust them on your own house, because as far as the customer’s concerned, it is your work.

Queezy keeps your quotes, customers and job schedule in one place, so you can see what’s booked, who’s on what, and which quotes are still waiting when you’re planning next week’s work. Download it free on iPhone.

When to Take On Your First Employee or Subbie