Hiring your second printer
The owner's playbook for adding staff without losing quality. Roles, training, and where Printer's Friend fits.
The second hire is the hardest. Here's what we've learned watching shops do it well, and badly.
Hire the role, not the person
Write the role first. What are they doing on a Tuesday? What's their week? What does "great" look like in 90 days? If you can't write that down, you don't yet have the role.
Most second hires fail because the owner couldn't articulate the role and ended up hiring a "second me" who got bored or made decisions the owner disagreed with.
The three real second-hire roles
Press operator
Runs the press, packs orders, handles QC. Reports directly to the owner. Tactile work, predictable rhythm, eventually owns the floor when the owner is on holiday. Most common second hire.
Sales / customer manager
Handles all incoming enquiries, quotes, approval chasing, customer relationships. The owner stays on the press. Less common second hire but unlocks growth faster if you're already maxing out the press.
Designer / artworker
Takes raw customer input (a Word doc, a photo, a hand-drawn sketch) and turns it into print-ready files. Rarest second hire but absolutely the right call if your bottleneck is artwork prep.
Where Printer's Friend fits
The platform's role-based access lets you scope the second person tightly. A press operator gets the production board, the floor TV, and read access to orders. They don't see pricing, margins, or customer financials. A sales hire gets quoting, customers, the portal, but not the press schedule until they've earned it.
The 90-day onboarding
| Days | Goal | Their week looks like |
|---|---|---|
| 0-30 | Learn the press | Shadow the owner, set up screens, no solo runs |
| 30-60 | Own short runs | Take any job under 50 units start to finish, owner reviews |
| 60-90 | Own the day | Run the press solo, owner only in for screens + sales |
The conversation at day 60
Schedule a 30-minute check-in. Ask three questions: what's getting easier, what's still hard, what do you wish I'd told you in week one. Their answer to the third is your training-manual update for the next hire.
The second hire either doubles your capacity or halves your sanity. The difference is almost always whether the owner committed to letting them own real work by day 60. If you're still doing every press run at week 8, you've hired an assistant, not a printer.
When to make the third hire
When you can't take a Friday off without something breaking. Two-person shops are fragile by structure: one sick day and a deadline slips. The third hire breaks that.