Decision deck · No-fibs

The Case for Hiring an Assistant

Justifying an hourly rate and the return on the investment — across marbles, photography, and software.

The argument: three businesses are bottlenecked on one person's hours. The marble inventory is already bought and listed — the database holds 2,000+ records (a floor, not the total). An assistant at a justified hourly rate converts that sitting inventory into sales and returns the owner's hours to the work only he can do.

Rate justification: the task mix (product photography, listing admin, packing/shipping) suggests $18/hour to start — trainable, process-driven work with the platform's templates and workflows already in place.
Break-even: ~$1,560/month at 20 hrs/week equals roughly 36 extra marble sales a week at an assumed margin — every assumption labeled on its slide.
The bigger return: reclaimed hours go to photography sessions and the software platform that scale without the owner's hands.

No-fibs: inventory counts and prices in this deck are real — pulled live from the app database when the deck is generated. Sales projections are speculative with their assumptions stated on the slide; the "thousands of unlisted marbles" backlog is the owner's stated count, not an audited inventory; wage ranges are market estimates, not verified statistics. Nothing in the deck invents revenue or sales history.