SME Roundtable: Questions, Hot Takes & Real Talk
What’s Tougher: Finding New Customers or Finding Great Employees?
Quick roundtable question for SME owners. If you had to pick your bigger headache right now, which one is tougher?
Finding new customers or finding great employees? 🤷♂️
Some people say sales fixes everything, but hiring is a nightmare. Others have a solid team, but need more clients to keep the lights on. Either way, it’s a classic dilemma.
Why This One Is Hard
If you don’t have customers, nothing else matters. But if you don’t have capacity, growth turns into chaos. And for most SMEs, you’re trying to solve both at the same time.
Customer growth can feel unpredictable. Hiring can feel slow, expensive, and risky. So you end up stuck in the middle with too much to do and not enough certainty.
Be Honest, Which One Are You Fighting Right Now?
A) Customers. We need more demand.
B) Team. We need better people or more capacity.
C) Both, and it’s exhausting.
If you’ve solved one side already, share what changed. Did you find a reliable acquisition channel? Did referrals start working? Did you improve conversion? Did one key hire unlock everything?
Where Systems Make Both Easier
A lot of founders get pulled into the same loop. Sales feels urgent, so delivery becomes reactive. Delivery feels urgent, so sales becomes inconsistent. And the cycle repeats.
Better systems don’t magically solve sales or hiring. But they reduce the background chaos so you can focus on the real bottleneck. That’s why we build WAi Forward around connected workflows.
- Lead the WAi helps keep marketing and sales moving consistently without relying on memory and manual chasing.
- PathWAI helps organise delivery and tasks so your team stays aligned and you can scale without chaos.
- PAI it Forward reduces finance admin and improves cash flow visibility, which makes hiring decisions less stressful.
Over to You
What’s tougher for you right now: customers or employees?
Share which one you picked and one sentence on why. And if you’ve cracked one side, tell us what worked.
Let’s see which struggle wins this week. 👇