Looking for a way to add a crew without guessing what it will cost? Steven Palmieri, a Tax CFO, takes the question in two halves. First the arithmetic of what another crew costs and what it needs to carry itself. Then the setup, so the new people are hired and paid the right way from the first week.
Wages are the part everybody sees. Around them sit the payroll taxes the employer pays, insurance, the truck, the fuel, the tools, the uniforms and the training time. Then come the slow weeks, when the crew is paid and the schedule is thin. A crew that bills 30 weeks of the year still costs 52.
We build that number from your own books and not from a rule of thumb. Your costs per crew-day, your usual idle time and your insurance quotes are the inputs. The result is what one more crew costs per month, in your business.
Divide the monthly cost of the crew by what the average job leaves. Say a design firm adds a project team that costs $24,000 a month and its jobs leave about $6,000 each after direct costs. This is a made-up firm with round numbers. The team needs four jobs a month to carry itself, and anything beyond four is margin. If the pipeline shows two, the owner has a clear decision. Wait, or find the other two jobs first.
Owners often add capacity with subcontractors to avoid payroll. The IRS looks at behavioral control, financial control and the relationship of the parties, and it says the label does not decide it. If you direct how the work is done, supply the tools and expect the worker to serve only you, the worker may be an employee whatever the paperwork says. Getting it wrong can be expensive. We bring the facts and the cost of each path to the decision.
New hires mean a payroll setup, and the provider is one you run. We help you choose it, register the business, set each person's pay and link the provider's feed to the books by job, so labor lands where it belongs. Payday and any customer-required reports stay with the provider. We never process payroll, but we keep watch on the quarterly and annual filings.
Most private employers in Texas may choose whether to carry workers' compensation, and an employer that does not carry it has to give notice to its employees and to the state. We give no advice on the choice. What we do is show how each option changes the monthly cost, so the decision rests on the cash view. Your insurance agent or an attorney can speak to the rest.
An employer also opens an unemployment tax account with the Texas Workforce Commission, and the TWC asks for that registration within ten days of the day the business becomes liable. For 2026 the tax applies to the first $9,000 a worker earns, and the quarterly report goes on the calendar.
The first month with a new crew is usually the most expensive. Training is slow, tools are bought, and the first jobs may run long. We build that month into the plan, so it looks like an investment and not a mistake. Costs from the new crew are tagged to their jobs from day one, so you can compare them honestly with the old one. For the full set of tax dates a new employer faces, read the tax dates a business in Fort Worth plans cash around. For pricing the work the crew will do, see bidding the next job.
Run the numbers on one more crew with us on a free Second Look call. No paperwork and no payment.
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice.