12 people on payroll. ÂŁ50k months. Multiple six figures of profit sat in the business account. An office in Dubai with my name on the lease.
On paper, the whole thing worked.
But, I dreaded every Monday.
Here's the part nobody puts in the announcement post: a team of 12 doesn't cost you 12 salaries. It costs you your calendar.
Every hire brought a person to manage, a process to write, a problem that couldn't get solved without me in the room. The business grew and my life shrank. By the end I was the highest-paid admin in the building, signing off on the work I used to love doing.
When people say to me now âI really want to scale and have a team so I havenât got to do any workâ I know theyâre brand new to business and really donât know what âscalingâ actually means.
Because, profit looked fine in my first business. Margin was ugly. Rent, tools, software, salaries, the quiet leak of a business built to look impressive.
So I rebuilt it. Small on purpose.
Today I live in the south of France. The team fits round a table. We make more money than the Dubai version ever did, at 80%+ margins, because there is almost nothing sat between the work and the money.
That isn't a downgrade. It's the Digital Bistro Table, a business designed around the life first, and the revenue second.
The trap is believing headcount is proof. It isn't. Headcount is what you hire when your offer, your positioning and your systems can't carry the weight on their own. Fix those three and the business gets smaller and richer at the same time.
Most founders are one restructure away from the version they actually wanted. They just built the complicated one first.
I did. You don't have to.