Most businesses that have grown past a single employee were built by the people who work there.
Some of them will have a positive effect on the culture. Some will have a negative one. But every single person has an effect, and that is especially true early on, when a company is still getting off the ground. One employee can genuinely make or break a new business.
People are not cogs to be swapped between organisations. There is enormous value in the individuals in a company, and in most cases the people simply are the company.
The interchangeability myth
Managers in larger organisations frequently treat people as replaceable, or at least interchangeable. That couldn’t be further from the truth, and the more skilled the workforce, the less true it gets.
Take IT. Someone “in IT” could be doing any of a thousand different things depending on their specialty. Testing? Quality assurance? Project planning? Do they write code, and if so, in what? The questions multiply immediately.
You cannot take two engineers in the same organisation and swap them without consequence. Companies do it constantly, because they don’t recognise the value of what they have, or how hard some of these skills are to replace.
The same is true in medicine, in research, in the trades, and frankly in most work where competence takes years to build.
What the interchangeability assumption actually costs
Three things, and none of them appears on a budget line.
Institutional knowledge. The person who knows why the system was built that way, which client is sensitive about what, and where the bodies are buried. None of that is in a job description and all of it leaves with them.
Relationships. Clients frequently have a relationship with a person rather than with your company. Swap that person out and you find out which, usually at renewal.
The signal to everyone remaining. Treat one person as replaceable and everybody else updates their assumptions about their own position. That doesn’t produce loyalty or effort. It produces quiet job-hunting.
The mistake companies make when money gets tight
This is the part I feel most strongly about.
When a business is spending too much for too little return, the reflex is to remove people and distribute their work among those who remain. It’s fast, it’s measurable, and it looks decisive.
It is frequently the wrong answer, because it treats a strategy problem as a cost problem.
If the business isn’t working, the work itself needs to change. That means deciding what the company will and won’t do — which is harder, slower, and requires the owner to make choices rather than reductions.
Piling more onto the remaining people produces a predictable sequence. The best of them leave first, because they have options. The work quality drops. The clients notice. Revenue falls further. And then another round of reductions follows, for the same reason as the first.
I’ve watched that cycle more than once, and it always begins with a decision that felt responsible at the time.
What to do instead
- Work out what’s actually unprofitable. Not the whole business — which service lines, which clients, which activities. Most owners are surprised, because the busiest work is frequently the least profitable.
- Decide what you’ll stop doing. This is the genuinely hard part and the one people avoid, because stopping something feels like admitting failure.
- Then look at capacity. If you’ve stopped doing things, the staffing question has changed. Sometimes it resolves itself. Sometimes it doesn’t, and then reductions are an honest response to a decision rather than a substitute for one.
- Protect the people who hold things together. Every business has one or two people whose departure would cause disproportionate damage. Know who they are before you need to.
The underlying point
A business is not a machine with staff slotted into it. It’s a particular group of people who have worked out how to do something together, and that arrangement is far more fragile and far more valuable than an org chart suggests.
The people made the company. Recognising that isn’t sentimentality — it’s an accurate description of where the value sits, and it should change how you behave when things get difficult.
