On Track Marketing made its first employer National Insurance contribution.
Now, before anyone accuses me of completely losing the plot, this isn’t a blog celebrating tax. I’ve never met a business owner who enjoys watching money disappear into HMRC’s bank account, and I’m certainly not about to become the first.
What caught my attention wasn’t the payment itself. It was what the payment represented.
For most of OTM’s journey, we’ve grown in a fairly typical small business fashion. We’ve worked with trusted freelancers, specialist subcontractors and part-time support as workloads increased, allowing us to access the skills we needed while keeping the business agile enough to deal with the inevitable peaks and troughs that come with growth. It’s a model that has worked well for us, and it’s one that countless businesses across the UK rely on every day.
Recently, though, we reached a point where that model started to evolve.
It wasn’t a dramatic moment. There wasn’t a grand strategy meeting, a five-year plan pinned to the wall or some declaration that we were entering a bold new era. The reality was far less exciting. We were simply making another decision that felt right for the business, our clients and where we want OTM to be in the future.
Yet that decision came with a reminder of something many small business owners are wrestling with right now. Every time you open the news, somebody is talking about inflation, operating costs or economic uncertainty, but those headlines can sometimes make it easy to forget what growth actually looks like on the ground.
For most small businesses, growth isn’t a chart on a Government report. It’s a decision made by somebody sitting at a kitchen table, reviewing figures late at night and trying to work out whether the next step is worth taking. It’s looking at your workload, looking at your clients and asking yourself whether you’re ready to take on more responsibility in pursuit of something bigger.
When people talk about employing somebody, the conversation often begins and ends with salary. In reality, salary is just the starting point. There are National Insurance contributions, pension contributions, equipment, software, training, insurance, holiday entitlement and a long list of additional costs that sit behind every hire. None of those things are unreasonable, and nor should they be. The issue is that when you add them together, the gap between wanting to employ somebody and feeling confident enough to do it becomes much larger than many people realise.
Rachel and the team at accountant_she have written and spoken extensively about the pressures facing small businesses, and much of it will sound familiar to anyone running a company in 2026. Rising employment costs, increasing compliance requirements and tighter margins are creating an environment where growth still feels achievable, but rarely feels straightforward. One of the points Rachel has raised several times is the contrast between businesses investing in UK jobs and skills versus those shifting work offshore. It’s a conversation that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves because every local hire represents an investment in people, training and communities, not just a line on a spreadsheet.
Read more from Rachel at accountant_she here.
The strange thing is that most people only see the visible signs of growth. They see the new office, the new vehicle or the announcement about a new team member. What they don’t see are the months of planning, the sleepless nights and the countless spreadsheets that happened beforehand.
That’s where I think the conversation around small business often becomes disconnected from reality.
Every politician wants businesses to create jobs. Every economic forecast talks about growth. Every local authority wants successful companies investing in their communities. Yet all of those ambitions ultimately depend on thousands of business owners making decisions that carry genuine financial risk.
Nobody creates a job because they’re bored on a Tuesday afternoon. They create a job because they believe in the future of their business enough to commit to it. That’s why small businesses matter so much.
They aren’t just generating revenue. They’re creating opportunities, supporting local economies and helping develop the skills that businesses across the country rely on. Most importantly, they’re doing all of that without any guarantee that the decision will pay off.
When you look at it through that lens, our first employer National Insurance contribution felt like more than just another payment. It was a reminder that OTM is continuing to move forward.
Not at breakneck speed, and certainly not without the occasional mistake, but steadily and with a vague idea of where we want to go. The business we’re building today looks very different to the business we started, and I suspect the business we run five years from now will look different again.
One day, we might have an OTM creative space, an actual office where the team can get together more regularly. A company vehicle would be nice too, although it would need to live up to our motorsport specialism and probably end up wearing far too much pink. Those are the milestones people tend to notice because they’re visible. They make good photographs, easy social media posts and obvious indicators of success.
The reality is that those milestones are usually the result of hundreds of smaller decisions that happened long beforehand. They come from choosing to invest when it would be easier not to, backing people when there are safer options available and continuing to build even when the economic climate would give you plenty of reasons to sit still.
That’s why this milestone stayed with me, not because it was exciting, but because it was a reminder that growth rarely arrives with a fanfare. More often than not, it arrives disguised as responsibility, and it’s only when you look back that you realise how far you’ve travelled.
The Motorsport Take
One of the biggest misconceptions in motorsport is that success happens on race day.
The podium celebration is simply the visible part of the process. Long before the trophies, somebody made the decision to invest in better equipment, employ another mechanic, book additional testing days or commit to a championship campaign that stretched the budget. Those decisions rarely attract attention at the time, yet they are often the reason success becomes possible later.
The same applies to race teams as it does to businesses. Most people only see the result. They don’t see the investment, the planning, the sacrifices or the risks that happened months beforehand.
Business works in much the same way.
The milestones people notice are usually built on foundations they never see. A growing team, a larger client base or a bigger business are all outcomes of decisions that were made months or years earlier, often when the result was anything but guaranteed. Whether you’re running a race team or building a business, progress usually starts with somebody deciding that standing still is a bigger risk than moving forward.
