The work is real. Invoices have to be assembled from finished jobs and walked through approval. Receivables have to be aged, ranked, contacted, and logged. Labor hours and receipts have to land against jobs while the jobs are still running, or nobody ever knows what a job made until the accountant closes the year. When that work outgrows the owner, it goes somewhere. The question is where, and at what monthly cost.
The ladder
There are three rungs, and every shop is standing on one of them. The figures are typical ranges for a trade shop in this revenue band, stated for comparison; they are not quotes, and your market will differ.
| The alternative | Cost per month |
|---|---|
| The owner, nights and weekends | Unpriced, and not free |
| A part-time operations person | $3,000 to $6,000 loaded |
| A full-time operations hire | $7,000 to $10,000 loaded |
The first rung is the most common and the worst priced. The hours the owner spends assembling invoices and chasing receivables are the most expensive hours in the company, because they displace the work only the owner can do: estimating, winning work, running crews, keeping customers. A back office run at eleven at night is not free. It is billed against the growth of the business, at a rate nobody writes down.
The full-time arithmetic, worked
The third rung deserves its arithmetic in the open, because the salary is the smallest part of the surprise. The figures below are an illustration in typical ranges, not a quote.
- Base salary for an operations manager at a trades shop: $70,000 to $95,000 a year.
- Employer payroll taxes at roughly 8 percent: $5,600 to $7,600.
- Health insurance, retirement match, and the rest of the benefits load: $8,000 to $15,000.
- Recruiting, onboarding time, a phone, a desk, software seats: real money, mostly in the first year.
The loaded total lands between roughly $84,000 and $118,000 a year, which is $7,000 to $10,000 a month. And the monthly figure still understates the first year, for two reasons that have nothing to do with the person's quality.
The ramp comes first. A new operations hire takes three to six months to learn the customers, the vendors, the jobs, and the way the shop actually runs, and the full cost is carried from day one while the output arrives gradually. And the role is a single point of failure: the process lives in one head, so a vacation, an illness, or a resignation takes the back office with it, and a resignation restarts the ramp at zero.
What the work actually is
Written out as a week, the back office job is a list: assemble invoices from completed jobs, move them through approval, send them, keep the aging honest, decide who to contact about money owed, make the contact and log it, record what was promised, keep hours and receipts landing against jobs, and tell the owner what every job is making.
Most of that list is repetition with rules. A small core of it is judgment: approving an invoice, making the collection call, deciding when a late account escalates, and using what the margins show to price the next bid. The judgment already belongs to people in the building, the owner and the office. The repetition is the part the hire is mostly being bought for.
Where RunHank sits
RunHank does the repetition. It reads QuickBooks and the field software the shop already runs, assembles invoices from completed jobs and walks them through approval, creates and emails each one from QuickBooks the moment it is approved, keeps the aging and the ranked collections list and the contact log current, and collects labor, material, and mileage against jobs so margin is visible while the work is still running. The judgment stays where it belongs: a person approves every invoice, a person makes every contact, and nothing moves money on its own.
An operations hire also does things software cannot: purchasing, vendor negotiation, a jobsite visit, an unhappy customer handled in person. If that is the work driving the hire, make the hire. If the list above is the work driving it, price RunHank against the ladder first. Pricing is part of the demo conversation, and it sits below the bottom rung.