In 2018, I met a woman in Utrecht who ran a two-person catering business. She told me, “We’re just small, so we don’t need all that structure.” Two months later, her business shut down after a client sued over a mislabeled allergen.

She wasn’t incompetent. She was unprotected.

THE WHY

Entrepreneurs running small teams in the Netherlands often think they’re immune to the challenges of scale. “We’re not a corporation,” they say.

But complexity doesn’t wait for headcount.

It comes with clients, partners, regulations, and decisions. It hides in the VAT rules you forget to double-check, the HR obligations you downplay, or the supplier whose integrity you never verified.

And in the Dutch ecosystem, where rules evolve fast and tax offices don’t send reminders, assuming your size shields you is not just naïve, it’s dangerous.

THE NUMBERS

• €3,200: Average fine for non-compliance with Dutch payroll and wage tax declarations, even for one employee.
• 24%: Estimated time lost by Dutch micro-business owners due to unclear role distribution in teams under 5 people.
• €7,800: The average loss from a single unverified supplier fraud incident (2023 KVK data).
• 1: That’s how many people need to make a bad decision to destabilize your entire company, especially when the team is small.

Small is agile. But it’s also fragile.

WHAT NO ONE TELLS YOU

Simplicity is not a starting condition. It’s an outcome of structure.

Many small teams confuse “low overhead” with “low responsibility.”

They adopt a casual culture:

• No role clarity (“We just do everything together”)
• No documentation (“We’ll remember”)
• No audit trail (“It’s just us, we trust each other”)

This intimacy feels efficient, until someone gets sick, leaves, or makes a legal mistake. Suddenly, your informal shortcuts become costly liabilities.

What no one tells you is this:

You need more governance, not less, when you’re small.

Because you don’t have a cushion.

DECISION COMPASS

Ask yourself, today, not later:

1. If I were audited tomorrow, could I explain who decides what in my team?
2. Can I trace every client and supplier relationship back to a clear agreement and risk check?
3. What happens if one team member disappears for 2 weeks?
4. Do we treat compliance as a safety net, or as a bureaucratic burden?
5. Are we building a business, or just working inside one?

FINAL REFLECTION

The beauty of a small team lies in its intimacy, speed, and soul. But don’t mistake that soul for structure.

Governance is not bureaucracy. It is your way of protecting trust, roles, and decisions, before things go wrong.

And in a world where one fine, one absence, or one oversight can shut your doors, simplicity must be designed, not assumed.

Let your size be your strength. But let your structure be your safety.