Do you hire any staff (part-time / full-time)?

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dumitru

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Location
Dortmund, Germany
Yesterday I was wondering how many of you hire staff for your property... be it a gardener, a technician, housekeeping... or do you handle absolutely everything?
Are there seasonal jobs available?
I was thinking about internships, so I decided to ask if that is something valid for inns & B&Bs.
Thanks.
 
We do it all, I married Mr Handyman, and I'm Suzie Homemaker!
 
We try to hire one Housekeeper for the peak season. Sometimes we get one, sometimes we don't.
We do have a landscaping company that takes care of the lawn.
There is a guy who comes to plow when it snows.
Not really looking for interns because I'm not really interested in opening the books to summer help.
 
We hire part-time seasonal staff. We have a girl who works for us an average of about 30 hours/week over the course of our season (mid-May to mid-October). She helps with mowing the lawns, painting buildings, glazing windows, hauling brush, basically whatever we need her to do. She is also our head cleaner, and we have her help train other cleaners when they first come on board. It varies from week to week, but approximately a third of her time is spent doing changeovers (cleaning). We hire a couple other cleaners as well, most of whom work only one day a week (Saturday, our main changeover day). One of them has been available "on call" to help out with mid-week changeovers if needed.
 
We mostly do everything ourselves. In our busy season, I have a relief/housekeeper on call, but it's very minimal and we have someone pulling weeds & trimming about once every two weeks, otherwise it's all on us. We maintain 2 guest buildings, 3 acres and our own spring/water system. It's a lot to handle. We also do a lot of add-on packages such as dinner delivered to their room, fondue & picnic baskets and now small weddings and elopements.
I have had aspiring innkeeper interns because I work with aspiring innkeepers. The problem with interns is that it takes way more time to train and educate than it's worth. Not many innkeepers want to devote that kind of training just for someone who will be there very short term.
 
Thank you all for your input.
@Breakfast Diva: you make a good point. For a small property, training someone would take more time than doing it yourself, especially if it is a short-term commitment.
Just wanted to check the general opinion of internships, guess this is valid only for properties with bigger capacities.
 
I get emails asking for internships all the time. Never taken up on any. We are too small. They think we are going to pay their airfare! HA!
 
DH used to do the lawn & hedges but can no longer do it (it kills him that he cannot - next devastation will be giving up car keys) so I try to find someone to do grass or I do it. Planning to remove hedges and replace with a fence this spring. I found a high school girl whose family was in TOTAL need and I now hire her to iron pillowcases and help with the deep cleaning - ladder climbing - a couple times a year. I also try to "find" work for her before Christmas and Prom. The nice thing about being small is that I CAN handle all of it if I must - even at my age.
 
We are chief, cook and bottle washer, as the saying goes. DH does the lawn and heavy lifting. I do everything else. Teaching a temp. Intern would take more time than it would be worth. None of what we do is rocket science, but there are a million details!
 
There are B&Bs where you book a stay and they train you and let you run the inn for a weekend. But you have to pay for this package. I don't know of any that will give free training.
Riki
 
I am here by myself, 4 rooms. I have always hired someone to plow the driveway/parking lot but I mow my own grass and have usually tackled the mulching each spring. Last summer I caved and had a landscaper do some replanting and re-arranging of some of my plants and shrubs, and I'm going to let him mulch next spring. I think when one reaches Social Security age it is OK to slack off a little.
Just today I had a visit by an awesome handy man. He really belongs to my cousin, who was generous enough to share him with me.. One of the flourescent light fixtures in my kitchen decided to lose a screw and was in danger of falling out of the ceiling. It took him 90 seconds to fix it.
I had a TP holder in one of the bathrooms that was pulling away from the drywall. I kept looking for the way that the fixture attached to the metal plate attached to the wall, and for the life of me I couldn't figure it out, so I just kept trying to use putty to keep it in place, knowing that this was not a reasonable fix. My cousin figured out what the fix really would require, I got the materials together, and it took him only 10 minutes. He told me that there were supposed to be tabs on the bottom of the fixture that secured it to the wall and that they had broken off, and that's why I wasn't able to figure it out.
While he was upstairs I got him to flip mattresses. He was so big and strong that it took about 1/3 the time that it has ever taken before with all the other helpers I've had (usually family members or a high school kid). I am so impressed.
I know you were really asking about internships, and although we have a hospitality program at our local university, I can imagine that it would take me and a co-ed 3 days to accomplish what he did in less than an hour, and I doubt that odd jobs is what an intern would envision. Hey, this is winter. I feel fortunate to have 2 rooms booked today in the midst of our midwest deep freeze.
 
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