Employers' NI is about to go up. Can you still grow your business?

As if businesses haven’t been hit by enough rising costs in recent years, employers’ National Insurance contribution rates will go up on 6 April 2025, and the threshold will come down. This means employees will cost more, with no corresponding increase in sales or productivity. For a very small business this will easily cost thousands of pounds a year. For a small to medium business, tens or hundreds of thousands. It’s a serious extra hit. It comes in addition to new employment laws that make employing people less flexible and harder to manage. 

Business confidence is low, and many are announcing redundancies. Tesco is cutting 400 staff and Sainsbury has announced 3,000 job losses to address rising costs, including £140m in additional employers’ National Insurance contributions. At Decent Group we know of businesses that are cutting jobs and others putting growth plans on ice because they can’t afford to take on the new staff that would be needed.

A killer blow to growth plans? Maybe not.

These increases are real challenges for businesses of any size. Does this mean you have no choice but to batten down the hatches and delay your growth plans? No. There are other ways to increase your productivity levels without recruiting. 

For the cost of a single employee’s annual salary you can make a one-off investment that will give you benefits for ten years or more. You will gain efficiencies that will cut your operating costs now and set you up for expansion when you’re ready.

Here’s how that works. 

We can build a business software system that will provide efficiencies that add up to at least an extra employee’s time, or we can improve and enhance the systems you’ve already got. You’ll be able to eliminate the repeated manual data entry that costs you time across the business. You can make paper timesheets or hard-to-manage spreadsheets a thing of the past. Or you can connect your different software tools so they work together seamlessly. During more than 20 years’ work we have implemented hundreds of solutions that continue to save our clients vast amounts of time, and eliminate errors at the same time. 

The right business system will also give you visibility on profitability, your pipeline of work, the status of jobs, productivity and more. These tools are exactly what you need to expand, because as you simplify and speed up your processes, your business becomes more scalable.

But can’t AI do this for you? It might do some of it, but in most cases we find that the best answer is some simple process improvements using easy-to-use digital tools. Rather than something more experimental with unpredictable results. 

How to identify the big wins

If you’re interested in becoming more efficient, there’s a proven way to approach this without risk. We can run a workshop with you where we will take time to ask you how your business works – in detail – and together identify where the most impactful improvements could be made. We bring a lot of experience here. We think of ourselves as business process experts as much as software specialists.

If you have a feeling that things could be more efficient, just invest in a day of our time and we’ll have an open conversation to see what we uncover. A fresh pair of eyes can be very revealing. We would be looking for those areas of the business that are unnecessarily laborious without delivering real value to you or your customers. We’ll look for the low hanging fruit that gives you a big return on an investment in systems. 

We’re not there to take jobs away. We want to speed things up, help your people get more done and gain greater satisfaction from it. A good business system gives you more capacity, scale and resilience – empowering your people and enabling you to grow without growing your head count.