The cost of adding headcount isn't just salaries—it's that every new hire has to learn the process all over again, takes personal customer data when they leave, and then you have to start from scratch with the next person. The deeper problem is this: if the process itself is held together by personal experience, hiring more people just duplicates the same inefficiency at scale. A different path is to standardize the process first: organize product data, quotation rules, and trading terms into settings the system can execute, so everyone operates by the same logic. After doing this, new employees have a shorter learning curve, and experienced employees' knowledge doesn't disappear when they leave. Before you decide to expand headcount, first assess how many of your current manual operations could be replaced by systematic workflows. Usually you'll find that the urgency to hire isn't as high as you thought.