Working through Christmas didn’t make you committed. It told you something was broken.
Over the festive period, I had WhatsApp messages with several founders.
Different companies. Different products. Similar stages.
Post-funding. Teams of around 15–20 people. Scaling fast.
What surprised me wasn’t that they worked over Christmas.
That part is familiar.
What surprised me was what they were working on.
Not strategy.
Not next-quarter priorities.
Not the things they’d been hoping to finally get quiet time for.
They were chasing invoices that hadn’t been sent.
Manually onboarding customers.
Picking up dropped balls.
Doing basic admin to keep things from falling over.
One founder put it bluntly: “Nothing major shipped. We just kept things ticking.”
And that’s the moment that stuck with me.
Because if you’re going to give up time with family, rest, and recovery - especially after a chaotic year - you’d expect something to show for it. Something you could point to and say: that was worth it.
Instead, they’re entering January tired, frustrated, and already on the back foot.
This isn’t about hustle
Early-stage companies aren’t nine-to-five.
Founders work weekends. That’s reality.
But there’s a difference between working hard and working on the wrong layer of the company.
At 15–20 people, the reason you have a team is accountability.
Someone should own invoicing.
Someone should own onboarding.
Someone should be responsible for making sure basics don’t silently break when half the company logs off for Christmas.
When a founder is personally firefighting those things, it’s not bad luck.
It’s not “just startup life”.
It’s a signal.
What that signal is really telling you
When a founder spends Christmas cleaning up, it usually means one (or more) of these are missing:
Clear ownership of essential work
Explicit expectations about what “done” looks like
Regular visibility into what’s on track, what’s at risk, and what’s drifting
People with the capability - and confidence - to carry responsibility through quieter periods
Simple business continuity: who covers what, and when issues escalate
Sometimes the work was done - but sat in a silo, undocumented, invisible.
So the founder duplicated it anyway.
Sometimes no one owned it properly.
Sometimes the role was never designed clearly enough.
Sometimes onboarding never really finished.
None of this happens overnight. It creeps.
And Christmas is when it shows up - because the system is suddenly supposed to run without you.
The real cost shows up later
The obvious cost is burnout.
Several of these founders sounded exhausted, frustrated, and quietly worried.
But the deeper cost compounds:
You start the year without momentum or clarity
Your stress leaks into the team - whether you want it to or not
Managers model firefighting instead of focus
Strong people get tired of chaos and leave
The founder becomes the permanent safety net
Six months on, the company hasn’t just grown.
It’s grown heavier.
The uncomfortable truth
Founders often tell themselves:
“This is just what scaling feels like.”
But scaling isn’t meant to feel like endless clean-up.
Scaling should mean focus.
Leverage.
Progress on the things only you can do.
If you worked through Christmas and spent your time picking up dropped balls, the problem isn’t that you worked.
It’s that you were forced to work on things a company of your size should no longer need you for.
That’s what I mean by people debt.
Not a moral failing.
Not bad intent.
Just the quiet accumulation of unclear ownership, weak systems, and capability gaps — paid off later with your time, energy, and attention.
Christmas didn’t create the problem.
It revealed it.
And if this felt familiar, it’s probably worth asking:
“What is my company currently relying on me to compensate for - without me realising it?”