If you're going to be stretched thin financially after hiring a single new person, you probably shouldn't be hiring.
Then you do your risk analysis and determine if the risk of the person not working out is something you can stomach. At 1M/yr, the risk is you hire a salesperson who gets you no new accounts after a year, existing revenue drops for other reasons and then you are forced to fire someone productive to make ends meet because you're 100k in the hole. At 1.3M/yr, maybe it'll be extremely stressful, but there's a least a fighting chance that you won't be in the red at the end of the year. At 2M/yr, the worst case will still suck, but it won't put your business anywhere near danger of extinction because you have a rainy day bank.
Revenue is often not directly tied to headcount. Even if your 9 employees can barely keep up, your revenue should still be rising over time until a time you can financially support another hire. If your revenue is not increasing, then increasing your headcount is likely going to make things worse, and more importantly, you should be questioning the viability of the business.
Yeah, duh. Apparently you do realize this tautologically obvious point despite your churlish and contrarian argumentation against it. The need to do risk analysis as it relates to potential pregnancy was the main thrust of the post that you dismissively replied to by saying that any business can do equally well with 9 employees as with 10 as if it were some kind of fundamental truth - despite that assertion being trivially easily disproven even by your own logic.
Risk analysis is not the same thing as "hire based on pregnancy status". The former is accounting and math. The latter is discrimination and illegal.
In this thread, there seems to be this perverse line of thinking that the ends justify the means ("can't afford to hire a pregnant person but a man will surely help me grow my business!"). If you're one of the people already doing this and trying to make excuses, fine, keep making excuses and doing illegal things, but realize you're part of the problem.
If losing that finger is a common and reasonable expectation in your society, yes.
With that kind of logic why should the company even bother hiring a 10th person?
Let's put it this way: if 9 people can only produce enough revenue to pay for themselves, it would be risky to take on a new large client if doing so required an upfront investment that completely depleted your cash reserves.
If things went south and you couldn't capitalize on your investment, you'd have no way to fund a pivot or a recovery strategy. If taking a new client only required a 10th of your bank and things went bad, it would still hurt but you'd have some breathing room. A new hire poses a similar risk.
Startups don't work this way in heavy industry, especially when jobs are on the line.
I envy you, actually.
> Startups don't work this way
Just because it's common nowadays to offload risks to early employees in startups doesn't make it less scummy. It's one thing to operate in guerrilla mode when it's two dudes in a garage struggling to get ramen profitable, but it's an entirely different ball game when one's hiding their inability to deliver with angel money and cruising on the back of a dozen employees.
My wife was let go from a startup shortly after returning from mat leave. The company went belly up a while later. It was already clear to me from her descriptions they were toying w/ people's expectations given there was no path to profitability, and a completely illogical hiring spree.
That's simply not how the vast majority of successful companies survive.