Are we really burnt out, or is the job just harder now?
Why running a small business hurts more now — and what the data actually shows.
TL;DR:
It’s not just you. The data suggests that running a small practice really has become more expensive and more administratively demanding over the past decade. The work itself may not be harder, but the systems, compliance, payroll obligations and invisible admin around it have grown — which means more time, more cognitive load and tighter margins. That matters, because when structural pressure is invisible, we tend to assume the problem is our own resilience instead.
Where is this coming from?
I keep having versions of this same conversation.
A practice owner — or anyone running a small business — says something like:
“It feels like I keep doing more work, but for less money. But maybe I’m just tired?”
And everyone in earshot nods.
Because quite a few of us have been wondering the same thing and weren’t entirely sure whether we were just going nuts, burnt out, or even allowed to say this out loud.
It’s also a difficult question to answer from inside the vortex.
When you’re already stretched, it’s very easy to assume the problem is you.
Maybe you’re less resilient than you used to be. Maybe you’ve lost your edge. Maybe everyone else is managing perfectly well and you just need a better diary, better boundaries, a better morning routine, or whatever else we’re currently being told will fix the fact that running a business feels like trying to juggle seventeen octopi at once - each of whom has a tiny chainsaw in each tentacle!
So, me being me, I decided to stop going in circles on this one and just go and pull the numbers.
Are businesses actually doing worse?
This is where it gets interesting, because the answer isn’t a simple “yes, definitely”.
Formal company insolvencies are much higher in raw numbers - around 1,109 a month now compared with roughly 583 a month twenty years ago.
But there are also far more registered companies.
Once you adjust for that, estimated insolvency risk is actually lower: about 38 insolvencies per 10,000 companies now, compared with around 50 in 2003-06.
So I can’t reasonably claim that businesses are collapsing at some unprecedented rate.
Nor can I tell you that every practice owner is taking home less than they were ten years ago. My data doesn’t measure owner income, and I’m not going to pretend it does just because that would make a punchier headline.
What the numbers do show is a different kind of pressure.
The organisational load is real
We’re not talking about whether your boundaries are good enough, whether you need more therapy, or whether your self-care routine requires another colour-coded planner.
We’re talking about the actual structure around the work: payroll, systems, compliance, insurance, reporting, policies and the thousand tiny bits of invisible labour required to keep a small practice functioning.
And some of those costs really have increased.
In my modelling of a five-person psychology practice, mandatory employment-related cash costs rose from around 10.94% of Award payroll in 2016 to 13.60% in 2025.
The most recent snapshot puts that figure at around 14.09%.
And importantly, that increase is on top of the rise in wages themselves.
WorkCover. ASIC fees. Payroll requirements. Compliance systems. Software.
None of them is catastrophic by itself - but then they don’t occur in a vacuum either - they just accumulate.
The part I found even more interesting: time
For the same model practice, estimated compliance time rose from around 210 hours a year in 2016 to 280 hours in 2025.
Seventy extra hours.
That’s nearly two working weeks every year!
Not two weeks seeing clients, supervising staff, developing services or doing something that actually makes the business better.
Two weeks spent on the work surrounding the work.
And unlike a bill, that cognitive load doesn’t necessarily show up anywhere obvious in your accounts.
It just shows up in your evenings, and your weekends, and your ability to actually switch off when (if) you take a holiday.
The 2026 HPSS Award changes are a perfect example
The upcoming Health Professionals and Support Services Award changes illustrate exactly what I mean.
From the first full pay period starting on or after 1 October 2026, affected employee psychologists covered by the Award move into a new AQF and experience-based classification structure.
Psychologists are specifically listed at AQF Level 9, with new experience bands replacing the old generic Level 1 pay-point structure.
And this is exactly the point: implementing the change is not simply a matter of typing a new hourly rate into payroll.
Practice owners may need to:
confirm whether and how the Award covers each employee
gather qualification and professional experience information
translate existing employees into the new classification structure
review higher-level duties such as supervision or management
test base rates, loadings and other Award entitlements
review contracts and salary arrangements
communicate changes to employees
document how each decision was made
budget for further staged changes through to 2030.
None of those jobs is enormous alone.
Together, they take time, attention and brain space.
Good changes still create work
These Award changes are part of a Fair Work Commission response to gender-based undervaluation of health professional work.
That seriously matters - and of course I’m all for that.
But even good policy that we fully support still creates implementation work.
Someone has to read it. Understand it. Work out who it applies to. Change the systems. Answer the questions. Document the decisions. Remember the important dates and plan accordingly.
And in a small practice, “someone” is very often the owner.
What do we do with that?
First, stop automatically turning every feeling of overwhelm into a personal character assessment.
Sometimes there is internal stuff worth looking at.
And sometimes the job genuinely got heavier.
Then get deliberate about the organisational load.
What needs a better system? What can be automated? What can be delegated? What are you still doing manually because that’s simply how you’ve always done it?
Making life easier on yourself is not cheating.
And if the October Award changes apply to your practice, I’ve put together a practical pre-1 st October implementation checklist so you don’t have to hold all of that particular piece of invisible load in your head as well.
If running your practice feels harder than it used to:
It may not be because you’re less organised, less resilient or suddenly terrible at business.
Some of the load really has increased. More systems, more compliance, more payroll complexity, more things to remember, review and implement. None of it looks particularly dramatic on its own, but collectively it takes time, money and a hell of a lot of brain space.
So before you turn your exhaustion into evidence that you’re doing something wrong, have a look at the structure around you too.
If the upcoming HPSS Award changes are one of the things currently taking up space in your head, download the pre-1st October implementation checklist and work through it one step at a time.
And if reading this has made you wonder what else in your practice might be sneakily creating more work than it needs to, that’s exactly what I look at in the SPARKSFIRE Systems Snapshot. I go through the client journey and the systems chugging along in the background, find the five biggest friction points, and show you where things could be simpler.
No shiny-tech-for-the-sake-of-it nonsense. Sometimes the answer is automation. Sometimes it’s a better form, clearer website copy, a FAQ, or deleting a step that should have died two years ago.
You can have a look at the Systems Snapshot here.
Danielle Graber
Clinical Psychologist & Director
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