HR Breaks at 30 Employees. Here's How to Fix It Before It Breaks You.

There's a pattern I've seen a dozen times:

Company grows. Hits 30 employees. Everything falls apart.

Suddenly the informal systems stop working. The "we're like a family" culture develops cracks. Payroll gets complicated. Compliance gaps appear. Good people start leaving.

The CEO is blindsided. "We were fine last year. What happened?"

What happened is scale. And scale breaks systems that weren't built to scale.

Here's what typically fails at 30:

Payroll complexity. Benefits, deductions, multi-province employees, contractor classifications. The spreadsheet that worked at 10 employees becomes a liability.

Compliance gaps. Employment standards. Health and safety. Documentation requirements. What you could ignore at 15 employees becomes a lawsuit at 35.

Onboarding chaos. New hires take months to get productive because there's no system. Institutional knowledge lives in people's heads.

Performance ambiguity. Who's accountable for what? How do raises work? Why did that person get promoted? Without systems, resentment builds.

Retention problems. Your best people have options. If you can't offer career paths, competitive benefits, and professional management, they'll find someone who can.

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Build the Infrastructure Before You Need It

The fix isn't complicated. It's just unsexy:

Systematize payroll. Proper software. Proper processes. Proper oversight. This is not a place to cut corners.

Document everything. Employee handbook. Job descriptions. Performance review process. Termination procedures. Boring? Yes. Essential? Absolutely.

Hire ahead of the curve. The HR infrastructure you need at 50 employees should be in place at 30. By the time you're drowning, it's too late.

Integrate with finance. When HR and accounting are separate systems with separate vendors, you're the one reconciling the gaps. Payroll should flow seamlessly into your books.

The companies that scale smoothly from 30 to 100 built the foundation before they needed it. The ones that struggle tried to build the plane while flying it.

We've seen companies hit 100 employees without growing pains. It's not luck. It's architecture.

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