When a business gets busy enough that the owner is carrying work they shouldn’t be carrying, the instinct is usually to hire someone, which makes sense on the surface.
But hiring has got significantly more expensive in New Zealand, and for a lot of business owners right now it might not be the most sensible way to solve the problem. Because the problem is rarely "we need a full-time employee." The problem is that a role needs to be filled, and filled properly.
What hiring actually costs in 2026
Most business owners think about salary when they are weighing up a new hire, but salary is just the starting point.
From April 2026, employer KiwiSaver contributions increased to 3.5%. ACC levies have gone up again. The adult minimum wage is now $23.95 an hour. Add annual leave, sick leave, and the time it takes to recruit, onboard, and manage someone new, and the real annual cost of a full-time employee lands well above the number on the employment agreement.
There's also the cost that nobody puts in a spreadsheet: if the hire doesn’t work out, you've spent months training someone, your processes are now built around them, and you're starting again. For a small business with tight margins, that's not just an inconvenience.
None of this means you should never hire. Sometimes a full-time employee is exactly what a business needs, but it’s worth being honest about what problem you're actually trying to solve before you default to that option.
What most business owners are actually trying to solve
When you dig into why a business owner feels like they need to hire, it usually comes down to a few things.
There’s too much admin landing on the wrong person. Things are falling through the cracks because there's no system to catch them. The business is growing and nobody has capacity to absorb it. Or the owner is doing work that was never meant to reach them, and it's taking time away from the parts of the business that actually need them.
A full-time hire isn’t the only way to solve any of these things.
When a full-time hire does make sense
To be fair, there are situations where employment is the right answer. If you need someone physically on-site, or if the role requires years of deep specialist knowledge.
But if what you need is reliable, capable support for admin, accounts, scheduling, client communication, or the operational work that keeps the business running, it is worth looking carefully at whether a full-time hire is actually the most sensible way to get there.
A practical starting point
If you're at the point where you are wondering whether to hire, it is worth having a conversation about what's actually creating the pressure before you commit to anything.
Sometimes the answer is handing over a role straight away, sometimes it is putting the right systems in place first, sometimes the mix looks different to what you imagined. That's actually how a lot of our conversations at Strictly Savvy start.
We take over support roles for $958 a week. One dedicated NZ-based VA runs the role, backed by smart automations and a skilled global team, so you're paying for output rather than time at a desk. No Kiwisaver, no leave entitlements, no recruitment process, and no long-term contract. We've been doing this since 2012, which means we know how to step into a role and run it properly from day one.
If you're weighing up your options, it's worth seeing how the numbers actually compare. Book a chat with us and we'll figure out together whether handing over a role makes sense for where your business is right now.
