Taking on your first employee in a gardening or cleaning business

28 September 2026 · Updated 9 September 2026 · 3 min read

Hiring your first person is the biggest step a round based business takes. Overnight, the business stops being your diary and your hands, and becomes a system another human has to be able to follow.

This is a practical map of the ground. On the official side it states the steps and points you to the official guidance rather than interpreting it: employment rules change, and gov.uk is the source of truth.

Before anything official: is there really a job?

The honest test is arithmetic. A part time team member needs a consistent block of paid hours, week in, week out. Look at your business and ask whether there are, say, sixteen to twenty hours of steady work you could hand over, plus enough demand coming in to grow it. Hiring for overflow that exists only in summer creates a painful conversation in November. Many businesses bridge the gap first with a self employed helper for peak season, which is a different arrangement with its own rules about employment status. Gov.uk has a tool for checking employment status, and it is worth taking seriously, because calling someone self employed when they work like an employee is a well known way to get into difficulty.

The official checklist

When it is a real employed job, the core steps look like this. Take each to gov.uk for the current detail.

Check the person's right to work in the UK before they start. This is a legal requirement for every employer, and the check has to be done properly, not assumed.

Register as an employer with HMRC. You will run PAYE on their wages, meaning tax and National Insurance handled through payroll. Registration is free and needs doing before the first payday. Many small firms hand payroll to a bookkeeper or use payroll software; either is fine, but someone has to run it.

Get employers' liability insurance. This one surprises people: it is required by law almost as soon as you employ anyone, and the required cover is substantial. Your existing public liability policy is a separate thing and does not replace it. Talk to your insurer before the start date, not after.

Pay at least the legal minimum. The National Minimum Wage and National Living Wage rates change, usually every April. Check the current rates rather than relying on what you remember.

Provide a written statement of employment particulars. Employees are entitled to a written statement of the main terms, and most of it from day one. A clear simple agreement protects both sides.

Plan for pension auto enrolment. Employers have automatic enrolment duties for eligible staff. The Pensions Regulator's site walks small employers through it.

None of this is difficult, but all of it is real, and the businesses that struggle are the ones that discover the list after the person has started.

The unofficial checklist, which matters just as much

A new team member needs to know where to go, what to do there, and what good looks like. That means the business has to exist outside your head: addresses, access notes, gate codes, what each customer has actually agreed to. The week before your first hire starts is the week to write all of it down.

Decide their patch deliberately. Giving a new person a coherent area and a consistent set of customers builds their confidence and the customers' trust far faster than scattering them across the whole round.

And tell your customers. A short friendly message saying that James has joined the team and may be looking after their garden goes a long way. Customers are loyal to reliability, and reliability includes knowing who is turning up.

The short version

Prove the hours exist. Do the official steps properly: right to work, PAYE, employers' liability insurance, minimum wage, a written statement, pension duties, all checked against gov.uk. Then do the unofficial step that makes it succeed: get the business out of your head and into a system another person can follow.

How RotaRound helps