If you run a business of somewhere between five and fifty people, the safest assumption for the next twelve months is that the team you’ve got today is the team you’ll be growing with. Economists call the current labour market “low-hire, low-fire”, and for a business our size the phrase describes our operating conditions rather well. Holding headcount steady can be a perfectly good strategy, provided the way the work gets done keeps moving, and it deserves a deliberate plan rather than another round of job ads.

The surveys make the case awkwardly well. In May, the Small Business Expo’s 2026 State of Small Business Report found 82% of American owners confident about growth over the next six months, yet only 31% planning even modest hiring. The NFIB’s November jobs report found that 89% of owners trying to hire had few or no qualified applicants. That’s a lot of owners expecting to grow with no realistic way of adding the people that growth used to require, and the problem will be familiar to plenty of British owners too.

On the other side of the ledger, few owners in that position are keen to let good people go. If you’ve watched a vacancy sit open for four months, you won’t release a capable employee because one quarter was soft, so headcount stalls in both directions and growth, if it comes at all, has to come from the people already on the payroll.

The instinct, faced with more demand than people, is to keep the job ad running and wait, treating the empty seat as the plan and asking the existing team to cover “until we find someone”. The covering becomes permanent. The best people absorb the overflow without complaint until the day they stop, and the business grows more fragile with every month the vacancy stays open. Waiting for a hire you can’t make is a hope with a recruitment budget attached.

Michael Gerber had the answer long before anyone coined the phrase. His argument in The E-Myth Revisited was that a small business should be built so that ordinary people, following well-designed systems, produce excellent results every time, and that the owner’s real job is working on the business rather than in it. For most of the last twenty years owners could get away with half-doing that, because when the systems creaked there was usually someone to hire. Even at Vertical Leap, which I ran on Gerber’s principles for the best part of seventeen years, a new hire could still look like the tempting shortcut. That escape route has narrowed sharply, and what’s left is the work Gerber was describing all along.

Start with the job you’ve been trying to fill.

Write down what that person would actually have done in their first month, task by task. Then take each task in turn and decide whether it needs a new person at all, or whether it simply needs writing down, simplifying, handing to a tool or stopping. Whatever survives needs a named owner and a second person who can cover it.

Much of what you find will be work that exists because nobody ever designed it: the same report built slightly differently each week, the handover that happens only when someone remembers, the client query that bounces round three inboxes before anyone answers it. None of this is easy when everyone’s already stretched, and it’s tempting to put it off until the hire arrives. But as I argued in the senior hire that doesn’t fix anything, understanding the work comes before paying anyone to inherit it, and in this market the alternative is a six-month wait for someone who may never apply.

If your team is the team you’ll grow with, their development is your growth plan. The money you’d have spent on a recruiter does far more teaching two people each other’s roles, so that one holiday or one resignation doesn’t stall half the business. Cross-training feels like a luxury when everyone is busy, but it’s the cheapest capacity most small firms will ever buy, and it’s the groundwork for scaling output without adding headcount once AI is part of the picture.

I don’t know whether the market will thaw next year, but a business that has designed its work properly won’t have wasted the effort either way, because if the applicants come back it simply hires into roles that are clear. So take the job ad you’ve been running for months, turn it into a plain description of the work, and see how much of it still needs a person.