The Two or Three People

Being the CEO of a small or medium business comes with a weight most people miss. It is not the org chart. It is not the P&L. It is the two or three people without whom the week does not run. The ones you would fight for.

Every SME operator I sit with talks about their people the same way. Not by role. By name. The one who has held the top customer for eight years. The one the team trusts to say something is not right. The one who reconciles the month while the rest of us are asleep. They are the fabric of the business, and they know it, and we know it.

This is where the SME sits differently to the mid-sized org. A large company runs on process. It is designed to survive the loss of any one person, and it should be. An SME runs on the minimum number of people it takes to do what it does. Everybody pushes. Everybody repeats. And when one person cannot push for a week, the work does not disappear. The others absorb it. Quietly. We usually see the cost only later, when a resignation lands that we did not see coming, or a customer relationship goes cold because the person who tended it was tending five other things at the same time.

Good people do good work. Every SME CEO I meet understands this in the body, not the head. It's why a resignation costs more sleep than a missed quarter. The number in the P&L can be recovered. The person cannot.

And this is exactly why the technology conversation, at the SME scale, is different from the one being had in the boardrooms of the ASX 100.

What the tools have finally caught up to

For most of the last decade, the technology available to a small or medium business either automated the person out of the job or was so clunky it added a second job on top of the first. Neither served the CEOs I know. The first meant asking your best people to prove they were more valuable than a subscription. The second meant asking them to become part-time software administrators on top of the job they were already carrying.

We are past that now, and most of us have not yet stopped to name it.

For the first time, we can build systems around the person, rather than around the process. This is not a slogan. It is a specific technical fact. The generation of tools now shipping can be shaped to how a particular team already works, rather than requiring the team to reshape itself around the tool. That difference is the entire game.

The person who does your month-end close does not need to be replaced by an agent. What she needs is for the close to stop eating her Thursday nights. Not because she is not capable. Because the ten hours she puts into reconciling line items is the ten hours she is not putting into the conversations with your top three clients that will keep them next quarter. The tool should be closing the excel view, not her.

The operations lead who runs your logistics does not need AI in his title. He needs the seven tabs he has to keep open at once to become three, so he can spend the fourth on the actual planning that requires him. Same person. Better week. More output. More of himself left over for the parts of the job that require him and only him.

Where this matters most: what we choose to protect

Bill Gates wrote recently about the idea of "human-reserved" jobs. Roles we choose not to automate, because the loss would be too great. He was writing to policymakers. I am reading it as an SME operator.

The human-reserved layer inside a small or medium business already exists. It is the two or three people we started this letter with. We do not need to declare them a reserve. They already are one. What technology, done well, allows us to do is give them more of themselves back. Less operative work. More relation-based work. More of the presence that was the reason we hired them, and the reason our customers keep coming back.

This is a different sales pitch to the one being run everywhere else. It is not "replace your team with AI." It is not "cut your headcount by twenty percent." It is: make the most of the group of people you already have, who are doing the best they can, who are amazing at what they do, and who are the actual reason your business is worth anything at all.

The upside is not only productivity. It is the culture we always said we wanted our business to have. The kind of place where the good people stay because the work is worth doing, and the mediocre parts are not eating their afternoons. That is a company we would all like to build. Some of us, without knowing it, are one or two decisions from being able to.

Where to start

The honest answer is not to buy a tool. It is to name the person on your team you would put on your own reserved list, and then to spend one hour asking them what part of their week they wish they had back. Not "what would you automate." That is our language. Theirs is closer to "I keep saying I will get to that. I never get to it." That is where the tool lives. Not before, not around it.

Once you have that answer, most of the technology decisions become obvious. The ones that do not become obvious were probably not the right decisions in the first place.

I would like to know who you would put on your list, and what you think their answer would be. If any of this is landing, I am the person who thinks about this for a living, and I am one message away.

Who is on your list?