Way back when, about a year and a half ago, Kristof Irwin was starting to expand his sustainable engineering for home design business, Positive Energy.

“We actually brought on a lot of new staff in late 2019, early 2020. And then boom!”

Everyone knows what “boom” Irwin is talking about.

He kept his 18 full-time employees but said now’s not the time to hire more. There’s too much uncertainty.

“As a business, we are treading water. And as people, we are exhausted,” the Austin, Texas-based entrepreneur said.

Like many other small business owners, Lizelle Villapando can relate. She runs a boutique in Austin called Parts & Labour. She admits she’s burned out.

“If I could turn three of my part-timers into full-timers, then I would feel comfortable taking two days a week off,” she said. “But the cost of having five full-timers, and the cash flow that I’m seeing now, is scary.”

Cash flow is why Shelley Meyer is running her several Austin gift shops with only about half the people she had on staff before the pandemic. 

“There’s less work,” she said. “There’s less work and less customers, so when we have more customers, we’ll have more shifts, we’ll need more merch, we’ll have to bring in more people to process that merch. So we just have to wait until it happens.”

Meyer normally employs three people to run a warehouse full of inventory. But there’s not a lot of product coming through the stores, so right now, there’s no need for those workers.