Twelve Levers to Pull Before You Post a Job Advert
Photo: Francisclarke, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
A new employee on a £34,000 salary costs considerably more than £34,000. Add employer National Insurance at 15% above the £5,000 secondary threshold, pension auto-enrolment, recruitment fees, a laptop, software licences and the management time needed to bring someone up to speed, and the true first-year figure lands closer to £42,000. To justify that, the role needs to generate something in the region of £55,000 to £60,000 of additional gross profit - and in a labour market where suitable candidates are scarce and time-to-hire has lengthened, that return may not arrive for six months or more.
Before signing off a vacancy, it is worth testing whether the capacity problem can be solved with the resources already inside the business. The twelve levers below are deliberately low-cost. Most can be actioned inside a quarter, and several require nothing more than a diary entry and an uncomfortable conversation.
How to prioritise: impact against effort
Score each lever from one to five on expected impact and on effort, then plot them on a simple two-by-two grid. Work the top-left quadrant first.
| Low effort | High effort | |
|---|---|---|
| High impact | Debtor days, dormant customer reactivation, quote follow-up, cost sweep | Pricing review, range rationalisation, buying back founder time |
| Low impact | Weekly KPI meeting | Full systems replacement |
The temptation is to start with the ambitious projects because they feel strategic. In practice, the quick wins fund the patience the bigger projects need.
1. Re-price before you re-staff
Most SMEs have raised prices reactively rather than deliberately. A margin-by-customer analysis usually reveals that the bottom decile of accounts consumes a disproportionate share of service time. A 5% increase across a £1.2m turnover base is £60,000 of additional gross profit - more than the contribution a new hire would make in year one. Give contractual customers proper notice and grandfather long-standing agreements rather than applying a blanket rise.
2. Prune the customer tail
Rank customers by gross profit, not revenue. The smallest 20% frequently generate less profit than the cost of serving them. Re-pricing, moving them to a self-service channel or releasing them entirely frees capacity without a recruitment round.
3. Renegotiate the top five supplier contracts
Obtain three comparable quotes before renewal, check for auto-renewal clauses and annual uplift language, and ask for improved payment terms rather than a lower unit price. Extending terms from 30 to 45 days on £300,000 of annual spend is worth about £12,000 of working capital.
4. Trim the range
Every additional product line or service variant carries a hidden cost in stock, training, quoting and error rates. Culling slow-moving lines typically reduces stock holding precisely when the cost of financing that stock has become material.
5. Automate the repetitive cycle
Invoice generation, bank reconciliation, payment chasing and customer onboarding are the usual candidates. Open banking feeds, rules-based bookkeeping, direct debit collection and automated reminders remove hours of administrative work each week. Under Making Tax Digital, clean digital records also reduce the quarterly scramble.
6. Attack debtor days
Invoice on despatch rather than at month end, take deposits on bespoke work, run credit checks on new accounts, and review the aged debt report every Monday. Statutory interest and fixed compensation under the late payment legislation are available on most commercial debts and are worth invoking.
7. Reactivate lapsed customers
Winning back a customer who bought two years ago is materially cheaper than acquiring a new one. A short, personal outreach to everyone who has not ordered in twelve months often produces revenue within weeks.
8. Systemise the first ninety days
Early churn is usually a symptom of a poor onboarding experience, not a bad product. A documented first-90-day sequence - welcome call, training session, check-in at day 30 and day 75 - reduces refunds, complaints and repeat support work.
9. Fix quote follow-up
Most quoting processes leak revenue quietly. Set a rule that every quote over a defined value receives a follow-up call within 48 hours, record the outcome in the CRM, and capture the reason for losses. Conversion rates usually improve before any new marketing spend.
10. Sweep the cost base
List every recurring subscription, card processing rate, insurance premium, energy contract and telecoms agreement. Duplicated software is common after a period of growth. Adopt a rule that no new tool is approved until an existing one is retired.
11. Run five numbers every week
Cash at bank, a rolling thirteen-week cash forecast, debtor days, gross margin and pipeline value. A thirty-minute Monday meeting against those five figures will surface problems earlier than a quarterly board pack. Keep the set small enough that it is actually maintained.
12. Buy back the founder's time
A two-week time audit, logged in fifteen-minute blocks, usually exposes several hours a week of work that could be delegated, templated or stopped altogether. Written procedures for the five most repeated tasks make delegation possible without losing quality. Where a specific skill gap exists, a flexible arrangement - part-time, contract or an apprentice through a flexi-job apprenticeship scheme - may be cheaper than a permanent full-time hire.
Before you sign the advert
If the levers above have been worked and a hire is still justified, the case will be much stronger. Model the fully loaded cost, define the measurable outcome the role must deliver within six months, and decide in advance what would be done differently if that outcome has not appeared. A vacancy that cannot be described in those terms is usually a process problem wearing a job title.
Growth without headcount is not a permanent substitute for hiring. It is, however, the cheapest way to find out whether the constraint is really people, or simply the way the work currently flows.
