Getting help as a watch dealer

A watch business is a lot of small jobs: photographing, listing, answering messages, packing, bookkeeping, chasing a watchmaker, updating records. None of them is hard, and together they can fill every hour you have, leaving no time for the two activities that actually make money, which are buying well and selling well.

At some point the answer is help. The trick is choosing what to hand over.

Work out what your time is worth

Before hiring anyone, look at where your hours go for a couple of weeks. Most dealers are surprised by how much time goes to admin, and by how little goes to sourcing.

Then compare: what would an hour spent finding another watch to buy earn you, against what it costs to pay someone to do the admin hour? The profit article gives you the per-deal number that makes this concrete.

Hand over the repeatable work first

Good candidates are tasks with a clear right answer and no judgment about value:

• Bookkeeping, which is also the task most dealers do worst. The bookkeeping article covers what needs keeping.
• Photography, once you've defined the shots you want. The photography article is effectively a brief.
• Packing and shipping, following a written routine.
• Listing admin, such as posting a prepared description to several channels and taking listings down when a watch sells, which the cross-listing article shows is easy to get wrong.
• First-line messages, answering common questions from a prepared set of replies.

Keep these yourself

• Buying decisions and prices. Your margin lives here.
• Authentication, or a professional's opinion you've arranged.
• Final say on discounts and offers.
• Relationships with key trade contacts.
• Anything involving your business's money moving, unless you have proper controls.

Specialists worth paying for

Some work is better bought than learned:

• A watchmaker for service and repair, as the watchmaker article covers.
• An accountant for tax and structure, as the income tax article explains.
• A lawyer for your terms, warranty wording, and any partnership or consignment agreements.
• An authenticator for watches outside your expertise.

Protect stock and records

Bringing someone in means someone else near valuable, portable items and your customer data.

• Keep inventory records tight, so it's always clear which watches are where and who has them. The inventory article covers this.
• Limit access to the safe and to accounts, and use individual logins rather than shared passwords.
• Check stock against records regularly, as the security article recommends.
• Tell your insurer. Policies often have conditions about who handles and holds stock.

The obligations that come with people

Taking someone on, even casually, brings rules: whether they're an employee or a contractor, how they're paid, tax withholding, and possibly insurance requirements. Getting that classification wrong is expensive, so ask an accountant before the first payment rather than after the first year.

Start with a trial

Bring someone in on a small, defined piece of work before you commit to anything ongoing. A trial tells you what a job description can't: whether they're careful with valuable objects, whether they ask when they're unsure, and whether the work comes back needing correction. Watches punish carelessness, so a person who handles them slowly and asks questions is worth more than a fast one who doesn't.

Agree in advance what the trial covers, what it pays, and when you'll both review it. Ending a trial that didn't work is straightforward; ending an open-ended arrangement is not.

Write it down before you delegate

The tasks you hand over should be written down as a short routine: what to do, in what order, and what "done" looks like. Writing it has two benefits. The obvious one is that the work gets done consistently. The less obvious one is that you'll spot steps that could simply be dropped.