The Cost of Knowing Better: How Poor Mental Health Puts Small Businesses at Risk

When pressure looks like commitment

At year end, someone on the commercial team is working 18-hour days, trying to please everyone, pleasing no one, and least of all themselves, while sales push hard to get deals signed off before the deadline. I saw this many times over the years, and nobody sees the moment when pressure like this becomes a mental health issue, because from the outside it looks like commitment.

Nobody sees the moment when pressure becomes a mental health issue, because from the outside it looks like commitment.

In a small business that person is often the one who knows your biggest client or keeps a project on track, so when their judgement slips under pressure, the cost shows up in your revenue, your clients and your reputation long before anyone takes a day off sick.

What does poor mental health cost a small business?

Most small business owners I speak to already know poor mental health costs them something, but very few have seen where the cost actually sits, because it never arrives as one bill, it turns up in six different places, and most of them look like ordinary business problems until you trace them back.

Why don't helplines, apps and mental health first aid reach the cause?

When small businesses do act, it is usually with something borrowed from larger organisations, such as a helpline number, a mental health first aider, a resilience session or a wellbeing app. None of these are bad things, but most of them are designed to respond once someone is already struggling, rather than to stop the pressure building in the first place.

In 2024, Dr William Fleming at the University of Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre studied more than 46,000 UK workers across 233 organisations and found no evidence that individual-level offers such as mindfulness, resilience and stress management sessions, relaxation classes and wellbeing apps made people any better off than colleagues who didn't take part. His conclusion was that organisations have to change the workplace and not just the worker.

Mental health first aid has its place, but a first aider is trained to respond, reassure and signpost someone towards help, so the conversation usually starts once something has already gone wrong. In a small business, where the owner is often the first aider, the manager and the person setting the deadline, I think this is a lot to ask of one role.

What does preventative mental health look like in a small business?

Prevention is the seatbelt, not the ambulance.

It means building really strong foundations while people are feeling well, so when the pressure arrives, and in a small business it always does, people already understand themselves and each other well enough to talk about it.

Prevention would not have made that year end any easier, because the deadlines were real and so was the pressure, but it would have changed how people worked through it together. When people understand themselves and the people around them, communication improves and there is less of the friction that adds to the pressure everyone is already under. It gives someone the space to reframe the work in front of them, to recognise what they can and cannot control, and to set boundaries they can explain to their manager and their colleagues without feeling they are letting anyone down.

Prevention also means people have somewhere to go long before they need a mental health first aider, a colleague close by who has done the work on their own self-awareness and can offer a space for good quality listening, rather than trying to fix the problem or signpost someone on.

How does CLEVRA work in a small business?

CLEVRA is a preventative workplace mental health programme with eight steps, and everyone in the business goes through the same programme, from the owner to the newest starter. Each step helps people understand something about themselves, such as their values, their strengths and what they need to stay well, and by the end each person has their own personal guidelines, including the early warning signs that tell them pressure is building.

Around one in ten people become CLEVRA allies, so there is always someone close by who will really listen rather than rush to fix the problem or signpost someone on. Because allies have worked through the whole toolkit themselves and taken it further with their own coaching, they know it well enough to point a colleague towards the part of CLEVRA that will help, so that person can do the same work for themselves.

For a small business owner, this means each person takes their guidelines to their manager, so you can see when someone is overstretched rather than mistaking it for dedication.

If you work in a larger organisation and want the wider argument for building self-awareness across a whole workforce, read The Self-Awareness Gap: Why Your Mental Health Investment Isn't Working.

Protecting revenue, clients and people

Every small business owner I speak to already knows their people are their business, and most already know poor mental health is costing them something. The cost of knowing better is what happens when that knowledge stays on the shelf, a deal that slips, a client who goes elsewhere, a good person who leaves, or a claim that could have been avoided.

Protecting your revenue, your clients and your people starts in the same place, with people who understand themselves well enough to speak up while a problem is still small enough to fix.

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