Hire a second part timer or cut Monday hours with 22k a month coming in Staffing

Do the Monday close first, then hire once you can see straight.

The reason is that hiring while you are working 55 hours and doing admin at midnight means you will train badly, supervise badly, and probably hire the first available person rather than the right one. A new part-timer is not free time in month one, it is more work — recruiting, training, correcting, and payroll admin you currently do not have.

Monday costs you 900 gross, not 900 net. Take off the wages you would have paid, the stock and utilities, and it is likely closer to 500-600 of real margin. That is a fair price for reclaiming a day, getting your admin out of the evenings and being fit to hire properly in three months.

Third option nobody has said yet: hire the admin out, not the chair. A bookkeeper for a few hours a month, and moving bookings to something that handles its own reminders, took roughly eight hours a week off me for a fraction of a part-timer's cost. Your 55 hours is not all chair time.

Whichever you pick, decide now what number would make you reverse it, and write it down. "If Monday revenue does not reappear on other days within eight weeks, I reopen Mondays." Otherwise you end up defending the decision instead of judging it.

Counterpoint worth hearing: closing Mondays is easy to do and surprisingly hard to undo. Some clients quietly move to a competitor who is open, and reopening later means rebuilding that day from nothing. If your Monday is genuinely a third of a Saturday it is not dead, it is just quiet.

A middle option is Monday afternoons only, or Monday by appointment. Keeps the day alive, gets you most of the morning back.