Finding, Keeping and Leading People Who Actually Show Up (Copy)

SME owners have a lot to think about. This ain’t corporate. You’re in the chair for everything. Let’s explore that

When unicorns are easier to find than staff

Every business owner has a version of this story. You finally find someone who looks right on paper. The CV is solid. The interview goes well. References check out. You make the offer, they accept, and for a moment you feel that rare thing – relief. The gap is filled. The pressure is off.

Six weeks later, you’re wondering what went wrong.

Maybe they can’t actually do the job. Maybe they can do it but won’t. Maybe they’re technically competent but toxic to everyone around them. Maybe they just don’t show up – literally or figuratively. Whatever the specifics, you’re back where you started. Worse, actually, because now you’ve lost six weeks, spent money on training, and have to explain to your team why the new person didn’t work out.

Or here’s another version. You’ve spent two years developing someone. Slowly, patiently, building their skills. They’re finally at the point where they can take things off your plate. They understand the business. They’ve earned trust. Then they hand in their notice. They’re going somewhere that pays more, promotes faster, or just feels like a better fit. You smile and wish them well. Inside, you’re calculating how long it will take to replace what just walked out the door.

People are the hardest part of running an SME. Not because business owners don’t care about their teams – most care deeply, often too much. But because the challenges are relentless, the margin for error is thin, and nobody hands you a manual.

The Reality

Let’s name what’s happening out there.

The skills shortage isn’t a headline you read in the paper. It’s your Tuesday morning, scrolling through applications and finding nothing usable. The people you need don’t seem to exist. Or they exist but they’re already employed, comfortable, not looking. Or they’re available but they want a salary you can’t pay, flexibility you can’t offer, a career path you can’t guarantee. You’re not competing with other SMEs anymore. You’re competing with the mines paying twice as much. With Auckland and Sydney offering city life. With the growing appeal of contracting, freelancing, or not working at all.

Hiring roulette is exhausting because you never know what you’re actually getting. The CV looked great – but CVs always look great. The references were positive – but references are always positive, because who lists someone who’ll say something bad? The interview went well – but interviews reward confidence and presentation, not competence and character. Three months in, you discover what the CV and references and interview couldn’t tell you. By then, it’s already cost you.

Retention headaches are constant. Good people leave. That’s the nature of employment. But in a small business, every departure creates a crater. When someone with five years of institutional knowledge walks out, they take more than their skills. They take relationships with customers. They take understanding of how things actually work. They take the training you invested in. Sometimes they take other staff with them. You can wish them well and mean it, while also feeling the weight of starting over.

Wage pressure is real and it’s not easing. Everyone wants a pay rise. Fewer people want more responsibility to go with it. The market sets expectations you struggle to meet, especially when you’re competing with employers who have deeper pockets or more glamorous brands. Saying no feels like losing someone before they’ve even decided to go. Saying yes sometimes means margins you can’t sustain. There’s no comfortable answer.

Training time squeeze keeps you stuck in a familiar trap. You know the team needs development. You can see capability gaps holding the business back. That person who’s good but could be great with some investment. That skill nobody has but everyone needs. But there’s never enough time. You’re too busy serving customers, fixing problems, covering gaps. Training feels like a luxury for businesses with more resources. “We’re too busy to get better” becomes not a temporary condition but a permanent one.

Wobbly leadership happens when you promote your best technician into a management role and discover something uncomfortable. Being excellent at the work doesn’t mean being excellent at leading people who do the work. They were your best salesperson, your best tradesperson, your best operator. Now they’re struggling to delegate, avoiding hard conversations, micromanaging or disappearing entirely. They were brilliant at their job. Managing people is a different job, and nobody prepared them for it.

What’s Actually Going On

Here’s what sits beneath these challenges.

Most SMEs hire reactively. Someone leaves or the workload spikes and suddenly you need a person yesterday. There’s no time to think carefully about who you actually need, what the role requires, what success looks like in twelve months. You grab whoever’s available and hope for the best. Sometimes you get lucky. Often you don’t. Reactive hiring is a gamble dressed up as urgency.

Retention problems often start long before the resignation. People don’t usually leave on impulse. They leave after months of feeling undervalued, overlooked, or stuck. The warning signs were there – a change in energy, a withdrawal from discretionary effort, a flicker of something in a conversation you didn’t follow up on. The exit interview reveals things you could have heard earlier, if you’d been asking the right questions and actually listening to the answers.

Training gets treated as an event rather than a system. A course here, a workshop there. Someone goes to a conference and comes back energised for a week. But development that actually sticks requires something more sustained. Regular feedback. Ongoing attention. A culture that values learning and makes space for it. Most SMEs don’t have that infrastructure. They have good intentions and insufficient follow-through.

Leadership development barely happens at all. People get promoted because they’re good at their current role, not because they’re ready for the next one. Then they’re left to figure it out on their own, learning management by trial and error, often with casualties along the way. Some figure it out. Many struggle quietly, never admitting they’re in over their heads. A few fail publicly, and everyone wonders why they were promoted in the first place.

A Way Forward

None of this is unfixable. But it does require moving from reactive to intentional.

Start with clarity about what you actually need. Before you write the job ad, take the time to think properly about the role. What does success look like in six months, twelve months? What skills matter most? What kind of person thrives in your environment – and what kind doesn’t? Hiring well starts with knowing what you’re hiring for. That sounds obvious, but most hiring happens in such a rush that this thinking never gets done.

Build retention into the everyday. Don’t wait for the exit interview to find out what’s wrong. Check in regularly. Ask people what’s working and what isn’t. Create paths for growth, even small ones. Recognition doesn’t have to be expensive – a genuine acknowledgment of good work costs nothing and means more than you’d think. People leave managers more often than they leave companies. Make sure your managers are worth staying for.

Make training part of how you operate. Not a one-off event but a rhythm. Weekly check-ins where capability gets discussed. Monthly sessions where someone teaches something they know. Quarterly reviews where development is actually on the agenda, not just performance. Small, consistent investments in people compound over time. They’re also harder to cut than big annual training budgets, because they’re woven into how you work.

Prepare people for leadership before you need them to lead. Identify who might step up in future. Give them exposure to decisions, to meetings, to responsibility – while they still have a safety net. Let them see what leadership actually involves before they’re thrown into it. When the promotion comes, it shouldn’t be a shock to anyone, least of all them.

Accept that some people will leave anyway. Not every departure is a failure. Some people outgrow what you can offer. Some discover they want something different. Some were never going to stay long, no matter what you did. The goal isn’t to keep everyone forever. It’s to be a place where good people do good work while they’re with you – and leave as advocates, not escapees.

Where to From Here

If any of this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. People challenges are universal. The business owner who says they’ve got it all figured out is either lying or not paying attention.

At RegenerationHQ, we work with owners who are ready to get more intentional about their people. Not through HR jargon or complicated frameworks, but through practical thinking that fits how SMEs actually work. If you’d value a conversation about what’s happening in your team, we should talk.