Should I hire a second front desk person or is there a cheaper fix?

The hire question arrives after a bad noon — someone quit, or almost did, or the missed-call report finally got run. Before the job posting: size the problem against the solutions, because they come in very different denominations.

Size the problem first

Most desk floods are two to three hours a day — the noon collision and the 4pm wave. The rest of the day, the desk holds fine. A full-time hire prices an eight-hour solution against a three-hour problem, and the new person also lunches (during the flood), peaks (with everyone else), and goes home at five (leaving the after-hours dark exactly as before). The salary is real; the coverage it buys is narrower than it feels.

What a floor covers, and for how much

The automated floor — every missed call instantly gets a text with a booking path and a promised callback window — covers ALL flood hours, plus nights and weekends, for roughly a month-of-salary once and modest running costs. In a live practice we measure, the difference between an inquiry arriving into "something happens" versus "nothing happens" was threefold on bookings; the floor moves every flood call into the first category. It doesn't replace warmth. It buys warmth time.

When the hire genuinely wins

Real cases: floods that run most of the day (the problem isn't peaks, it's volume), heavy in-person load where the counter itself queues, or growth that's outrunning one human at every hour. The tell is in the measurement — if timed calls drown OUTSIDE the classic windows too, capacity is the issue and the hire is right. Then the first fix's baseline numbers size the role and justify it to your accountant.

The order of operations

Measure, floor, then staff to what remains. The free score estimates your flood shape in three minutes; the $500 first fix measures it with timed calls, then puts the floor under your worst window — before/after in timestamps. Payroll decisions deserve at least as much evidence as a used truck.