ABSTRACT
The owner-manager of a one-person company has no opportunity to delegate tasks. He or she is forced to take on the roles of sales manager, production manager, financial manager and general manager; the only task that he or she escapes is personnel management. However, this task is restored as soon as the first employee arrives. With a growing legal framework specifying terms and conditions of employment, personnel management becomes a high priority task. The step from the one-person company to a micro company with only one or a few employees is a significant one, due to the sudden increase in administrative burdens. This can be observed in the statistics of the growth of firms: in most high-income countries with employment legislation in place, firms with no employees represent around 70 per cent of the total. Despite of numerous support programmes to make small firms grow, this growth is hampered by high administrative burdens, which mangers react to by staying small.
