Is a bash script a sensible alternative to a cron job or C daemon

Question

Our production server is running into an issue with cron. Cron is set to execute every 5 minutes which works most of the time, however I am encountering an issue whereby a job may take 6 minutes to process. A second 6 minute job won't be actioned until 10 minutes has passed and sooner or later this is going to be a problem.

I've investigated writing a forking Daemon in C to listen for incoming requests -but this too is problematic because it would mean writing another API endpoint and chew into development time.

I've found what appears to be a simple solution, and am looking for criticism/critique:

for simplicities sake, a php CLI will output a 1 or a 0 depending whether there's a job waiting:

<?php echo "1" ?>

A bash script is able to check if there are any jobs in the queue:

#!/bin/bash
var=$(php -f ../readPhpOutput/testOutput.php)
if [ "$var" -eq "0" ]
    then
    echo "input zero"
else
    echo "input not zero"
fi
sleep 10

Another bash script is running with nohup to ensure the above script is running:

#!/bin/bash
while true
do
    value=$(ps -A | grep [r]eadPhpOutput)
    echo "grep output is: $value"
    if [ -z "$value" ]
        then /bin/bash ../readPhpOutput/./readPhpOutput.sh &
    fi
    sleep 5
done

Please note the above are simple, naive examples to illustrate what I am trying to achieve.

My main reasons for not wanting to write a daemon are inexperience with C, fear of fork bombing my production server, and a reluctance to install a compiler on the same server.