• Microsoft is among the latest to cut middle management jobs.
• Tech giants like Intel, Amazon, and Google are also flattening structures for efficiency.
• Experts warn that while flattening can speed decisions, it is possible to take it too far.

Companies are shedding bloated layers of management in an attempt to reduce bureaucracy. Some employees are applauding the move, known as flattening the middle, in the hopes of getting faster and boosting efficiency.

Microsoft said Tuesday it's slashing around 6,000 employees. While the days since have made it clear many of those cut were individual contributor-level engineers, executives previously told BI one motivation behind the recent cuts was to increase managers' "span of control," or the number of reports per manager.

Intel announced a great flattening last month, emphasizing more time in the office, less admin, and leaner teams.

"The best leaders get the most done with the fewest people," said the chip giant's new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, in a memo to staff.

Amazon has also increased the ratio of individual contributors to managers. They call it a "builder ratio." Google CEO Sundar Pichai told staff late last year that the company cut vice president and manager roles by 10% as part of an efficiency push. Meta has been at it for years, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg writing in a 2023 memo, "flatter is faster."

The risk is that these companies cut too many managers, leaving the remaining folks with too many direct reports.

But for now, it appears to be a risk companies are willing to take.

Agility and expertise

The logic of cutting from the middle to speed up is sound, management experts say.

"You can't go faster and be more connected to a larger ecosystem if you're having to go up and down a hierarchy for every decision," Deborah Ancona, a professor of management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Business Insider.

While some companies have been trying for decades to zap management layers, there's a new urgency to do so. Businesses exist in "an exponentially changing world," Ancona said.

Dell executives explained this to employees earlier this month, when they began reorganizing managers to have more direct reports. The company, whose head count has dropped by 25,000 in two years, also pointed to the influx of artificial intelligence as a reason it needed to move faster.

Ideally, companies would remove layers and spread decision-making throughout the organization so that those closest to customers or technology, for example, could generate ideas and make decisions, Ancona said.

"You're kind of flipping the organization," she said. "Rather than all the ideas coming from on high, you have entrepreneurial leaders who are lower down in the organization coming up with new ideas."

Bayer CEO Bill Anderson is leery of having to run everything up the chain. After taking over the German biotech company in 2023, he began implementing what he calls a "dynamic shared ownership" setup that has cut thousands of managers. Staffers come together in "mini networks" for 90-day stretches to work on projects.

"We hire highly educated, trained people, and then we put them in these environments with rules and procedures and eight layers of hierarchy," Anderson previously told BI. "Then we wonder why big companies are so lame most of the time."

Fewer managers, more reporting, more meetings?

When middle managers are cut and layers condensed, inevitably, more workers report to fewer managers. The logistics of that vary, and the success in terms of morale has a lot to do with the starting point.

Amazon started flattening last year. In September, CEO Andy Jassy ordered a 15% increase in the ratio of individual contributors to managers by March. BI reported that senior Amazon Web Services managers received a memo in January instructing them to restrict high-level hiring and increase their number of direct reports.

An Amazon spokesperson told BI at the time that the memo may have been intended for one team, but does not apply to the company at large. The Amazon spokesperson also referenced a September memo from Jassy on the importance of reducing management layers.

An AWS manager told BI this month that the flatter structure has since put more burden on employees on her team to report on what they're doing day-to-day, in addition to their actual work, since managers have less time to inspect individuals' work.

Plus, this manager said they are spending more time in meetings as they took on a more diverse group of direct reports. The Amazon spokesperson also emphasized that the individual employee's anecdote does not represent the company as a whole.

Yvonne Lee-Hawkins was assigned 21 direct reports when she worked for Amazon's human resources. She told BI that she had to quickly learn new skills to handle the load, like asynchronous work strategies, but her teams' performance suffered as her number of reports grew from 11 to 21 employees.

Weekly one-on-ones — the subject of much debate among tech titans — became impossible, and she had to cut them in half.

At Microsoft, a half-dozen employees who spoke to BI about the manager flattening trend generally regarded it as a positive step to eliminate inefficient and unnecessary levels of managers. Some managers have as few as one or two reports.

Microsoft ended up with many management layers, the people said, because it often tried to reward good engineers by promoting them to become managers. Often, those engineers-turned-managers still spent most of their time in the codebase and weren't very effective as managers.

Meanwhile, larger groups of direct reports often work better for senior employees, who need less one-on-one time and can do more things in a group setting.

A Microsoft spokesperson did not comment when asked about these factors.

Gary Hamel, a visiting professor at London Business School who lives in Silicon Valley, told BI that pushing managers to take on more direct reports can reduce micromanaging, a common bane of corporate existence.

When managers have a lot of people to oversee, it pushes them to hire people they trust, mentor rather than manage, and give up a "pretty big dose" of their authority.

"Those are all hugely positive things," he said, even if they require "a fairly dramatic change" in how managers see their role.

How many direct reports is too many?

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang famously has 60 direct reports. Managers at Dell have been told they should have 15 to 20. An AWS document viewed by BI in January mandated no fewer than eight per manager, up from six. An Amazon spokesperson told BI there are no such requirements companywide.

Gallup research indicates that the quality of a manager matters more than the number of direct reports in terms of how well teams perform. That's because more engaged managers tend to lead to more engaged teams. And small teams — those with fewer than 10 people — show both the highest and lowest levels of engagement because managers can have an outsize effect, for better or worse.

That may explain why some companies seem to thrive with dozens of direct reports per manager and others fail.

The nature of the work matters, too. When work is more complex, it can be harder for managers to oversee too many people.

Managing dozens of people gets harder when "life intersects with work," Ravin Jesuthasan, the global leader for transformation services at the consulting firm Mercer, told BI.

When employees have an issue, they often need someone to talk to about it.

"As a manager, you are the first port of call," he said.

That's one reason, Jesuthasan said, that having something like 20 direct reports would likely be "really hard." For most managers, the couple of dozen direct reports that many tech companies are aiming for is probably the limit, he said.

Strong managers can powerfully boost a company's ability to develop talent and its bottom line. A 2023 analysis from McKinsey & Company, for example, found that organizations with "top-performing" managers led to significantly better total shareholder returns over five years compared with those entities that had only average or subpar managers.

While flattening schemes may be successful at reducing bulk in the middle and speeding up decision-making, they can hinder future growth if they're not well-managed.

Jane Edison Stevenson, global vice chair for board and CEO services at the organizational consulting firm Korn Ferry, told BI that removing layers from a management pyramid can help elevate those high performers. But flatter companies may fail to develop leaders who can pull together the disparate parts of an organization.

At some point, she said, "You've got to start to make a bet on the leaders that are going to have a chance to build muscle across, not just vertically."

• Mark Quinn lost his job to AI, but says smart thinking can help people adapt to new ways of working.
• Experts don't always agree on the impact AI will have on jobs, though many expect big changes.
• AI will likely reshape many tasks, so workers need to build their skills to stay ahead.

Mark Quinn said he lost his previous job to AI, though he doesn't think it was a sign of a coming employment purge at the hands of bots.

Quinn was working for a generative artificial intelligence startup running a team he set up to oversee the answers the bots kicked out — the proverbial human in the loop.

Eventually, as the AI improved, the company found it could manage with a smaller, more efficient set of workers, the longtime tech exec said.

"My skill and the job I was hired to do was truly no longer needed," Quinn told Business Insider.

Because there wasn't another role that was a good fit for him, he left.

The idea of losing your job to a bot is scary, and some workplace thinkers have warned about it. Yet others hold a sunnier view: Whip-smart bots will take over so much that we'll be able to add a whole lot more to our to-do lists.

The absence of a solid consensus among the tech and labor cognoscenti about AI's impact speaks to how many questions remain and how often the answer might start with "it depends."

"Part of it is, we honestly don't know," Gary Hamel, a visiting professor at London Business School who lives in Silicon Valley, told BI about the effect AI will have on jobs.

He said there are varying opinions in the AI community about whether we're already bumping up against the limits of what large language models and GenAI can do or whether there are blockbuster sequels to come.

Hamel said we've often overestimated the impact of new technology on employment.

"As far as I know, over the last 50 years, only one job category in the United States has disappeared," he said. "That is elevator operator."

The list could grow. In 2023, Goldman Sachs said that some 300 million full-time jobs globally could be at risk of being automated. More recently, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that his company might not hire software engineers this year because of how much AI agents have helped boost some coders' productivity.

"I can't think of any roles that won't be impacted," Scott Russell, CEO of the tech company NICE, previously told BI about how AI will reshape work.

'An Iron Man suit'

Adam Brotman, cofounder and co-CEO of Forum3, a boutique consulting firm that advises companies on AI adoption, told BI that he expects AI will take some jobs, change others, and lead some companies to forgo posting some roles they might once have.

"It's this weird, ambiguous, conflicting thing," Brotman said.

What is clear, he said, is that AI will make many workers far more productive.

"It's going to be an Iron Man suit," said Brotman, who once ran digital operations at Starbucks and is the former co-CEO of J. Crew.

He said the business leaders his firm talks to and who understand what AI is capable of, are asking how they can make their businesses more productive and whether they can get by without hiring as many people as a result.

Brotman expects it will take another 12 months or so of AI being on the scene for businesses to have a clearer understanding of what the technology will mean for jobs. Ultimately, he predicts there will be a fallout, yet one that's not evenly distributed.

For a job like software development, Brotman said, AI can do a lot of the programming and quality assurance work, yet someone working with AI to generate code can also do a lot more.

He said it's become harder to answer the question of what AI will mean for employment because, as the technology improves, many of the gains will come not just from making organizations more efficient but from helping companies innovate and create new products and lines of business.

"It's not just about productivity. It's about this abundance," he said.

Ravin Jesuthasan, the global leader for transformation services at the consulting firm Mercer, expects there to be a "ton of dislocation" within companies and across industries that might not result in massive job losses across the US economy, but that will remake a lot of roles.

He told BI that employees will be able to get more done, but that AI will also create a lot of work.

This includes the need for people to ensure that the tech is functioning, that it's calibrated correctly, and that the output is used in an "intelligent, ethical, responsible way," Jesuthasan said.

Think about tasks, not jobs

Quinn, who lost his previous job to AI's prowess, is now the senior director of AI operations for Pearl, an AI search platform for professional services that pairs GenAI with human experts to verify responses are accurate.

He said the best way to think about how AI will affect work isn't necessarily about which jobs or industries are most at risk of being upended, but rather about the tasks and type of work that will change. Quinn, who's held roles at Waymo, LinkedIn, Apple, and Amazon, said AI will take on many formulaic and rote tasks.

He said that, as with any tech innovation, there will be some amount of upheaval, but that people can also learn to work with AI. The focus should be on what workers can do with the extra time they'll have.

Quinn advises companies to help build workers' skills and embrace different ways of getting things done. Otherwise, he said, employees could get left behind.

"The longer that people sit on the sidelines wondering if this wave is coming, the more at risk they are of getting caught off guard by the undertow," Quinn said.

When Laurie Schive and her husband opened Blue Loon Bakery in a small New England town in 2018, she didn't expect hiring and keeping workers would present much of a challenge.

After all, earlier in her career, Schive darted around dozens of countries as a clandestine service officer for the CIA, focusing on limiting the spread of weapons of mass destruction. She later served as a director of global risk consulting at a Big Four firm.

Nonetheless, finding people to bake the European-style viennoiserie and sourdough breads she'd grown to love living abroad wasn't easy, Schive told Business Insider.

Harder yet was getting them to stay, she said.

Hiring in the restaurant business has rarely been straightforward. Now, to attract and retain staffers, some employers say it's necessary to take a kitchen-sink approach: deploying various benefits, training, technology, and added flexibility in scheduling.

An all-of-the-above strategy is often necessary because labor shortages remain a perennial challenge in the restaurant and food service industry, which is estimated to employ about one in 10 US workers. The National Restaurant Association projects that the industry will add 200,000 jobs in the US in 2025, boosting employment to 15.9 million by year-end.

At so-called quick-service restaurants, many workers don't last a year or even six months, David Henkes, a senior principal at the market research firm Technomic, told BI.

"When you talk to restaurants about what they're doing, a lot of it just involves trying to stem the flow," he said, referring to the succession of hires and quits. That's because people often view restaurant work not as a career but as an "entry-level stepping stone," Henkes said.

For that reason, and because industry profit margins often hover around a scant 3% to 5%, it can be tough to persuade bosses to invest in workers who might not even last an entire burrito season. Yet, Henkes said, restaurants are increasingly putting money into hourly workers by offering "carrots" like partial college tuition, scholarships, and 401(k) plans.

These measures, Henkes said, "show that the restaurant is investing in the person." That, in turn, can pay off by reducing the share of workers who hand in their aprons well before making it a year in the job.

Finding a career, not just a job

The burrito chain Chipotle's turnover among hourly restaurant workers — crew and managers — dropped from 164% in 2022 to 145% in 2023 and then to 131% in 2024, the company told BI. Turnover above 100% means that the business, like many of its peers, has to replace more workers in a year than it employs at one time.

Salaried restaurant managers and field staff have also been leaving the Newport Beach, California-headquartered company at lower rates in recent years.

These are decreases that Lois Alexis-Collins, Chipotle's chief people officer for field operations, attributes in part to the company's efforts to show workers that there are ways to progress in a career rather than just hold down a job.

That growth could mean going from burrito slinger to regional vice president, which involves overseeing as many as 500 locations. Compensation for those management jobs tops $600,000 annually, the company said. Alexis-Collins said part of the messaging to newbies includes being clear about what it takes to get ahead.

"You're not guessing," she said. More than 85% of Chipotle managers started on store crews, Alexis-Collins said.

The company offers quarterly bonuses of a week's pay to crew members whose restaurants do well, up to $5,250 a year for education, and a debt-free degree program.

Still, most of its restaurant workers "come in wanting a job," she said.

Alexis-Collins said Chipotle has tried to make improvements, especially at the general manager level, because they are "the captain of the ship."

One effort involves an artificial intelligence platform that chats with job candidates, collects their information, schedules interviews, and sends offer letters on a manager's behalf. Chipotle thinks the tool, called Ava Cado, could cut the time it takes to hire restaurant workers by as much as 75%. That's a help to management.

"The more stable the restaurant leader is, the better retention for the crew team," Alexis-Collins said.

Chad Moutray, the National Restaurant Association's chief economist, likewise told BI that having the right manager in place matters not only for the bottom line but also for "making sure that your workers are sticking around."

He said a lot of food service workers tend to get jobs at places where they already eat. That creates a level of buy-in from the start, Moutray said. Yet, for employees to stay, they also need to feel appreciated, have colleagues they like working with, and have managers who lay out what's expected, he said.

Getting tech to do some gruntwork

Henkes, from Technomic, said more restaurants are making "a big push" to increase job satisfaction by using technology to take some menial tasks off workers' plates. That can include adding kiosks where customers place orders or introducing automation to the back-of-house areas where food gets prepped.

Henkes said that while a lot of the investments that restaurants are making in technology relate to labor, the goal generally isn't to replace workers. Instead, he said, it's to do things like automate taking inventory to free up workers to interact with customers.

"What it's doing is redeploying them to higher-value activities," Henkes said, referring to technology.

He said software that juggles workers' shift requests can give employees more predictability and flexibility in their schedules. That's important for boosting job satisfaction, but it also helps restaurant workers who hold down more than one job.

"It has become a very scientific approach to making sure that people are scheduled when they want to be and that shifts are covered," Henkes said.

Boosting pay and benefits

Schive, at Blue Loon Bakery, said that while labor is the cost that she has the most control over, corralling employees is the hardest thing about running the business.

"You recruit them, you train them, and then you have to retain them," she said.

Schive uses a calculator from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to determine a living wage for full-time workers at her New London, New Hampshire, bakery, which occupies a white clapboard house built in the 1830s and an attached barn.

As the pandemic began to subside and workers in many industries stepped up their job-hopping, Schive and her co-owner and husband, Mike Morgan, decided they needed to boost pay and other benefits, especially for full-time workers.

Blue Loon covers 75% of full-time workers' healthcare premiums and offers a retirement account with a 3% match.

Recently, the bakery added six weeks of paid family medical leave for part-time and full-time workers.

"I don't know that it really contributed a large part to our recruiting effort, but it helps," Schive said.

She and her husband have worked with real estate agents to try to find workers a place to live in a tight housing market. The couple also let an employee use a small cottage on their property while she looked for a home.

Schive, who is the chair of the Bread Bakers Guild of America, said other bakeries and restaurants had taken similar steps to help workers secure housing because a dearth of affordable options can be a barrier to attracting employees.

Blue Loon now has more than two dozen staffers in place for the busy summer tourist season — about double what it has in winter.

The goal now is to keep them. That includes the overnight baker Schive hired after pandemic lockdowns temporarily closed a nearby college where he had been working.

"I'm holding onto him like grim death," she said, "because he's wonderful."

• Some CEOs are asking when they'll make money from AI, BCG's Sylvain Duranton told Business Insider.
• He said the biggest factor in succeeding with AI isn't the tech, but changing how people work.
• Duranton said it can be tough to see gains from AI because the tech can be difficult to scale.

Like a first date that's gotten awkward, some companies struggling to win at artificial intelligence might be trying too hard.

They might take on too many projects or fail to understand that AI windfalls often come from rewiring how people work, not from "super-cool" AI engines or large-language models, said Sylvain Duranton, global leader of BCG X, the tech build and design division of Boston Consulting Group.

Those types of missteps can balloon into big-time frustrations for business leaders, he told Business Insider.

Duranton said that if CEOs' big question around AI in 2024 was which model to use, their ask in 2025 is "Where's my money?"

Indeed, he said, there are often challenges around implementing broad use of AI.

"Scaling this thing from a tech standpoint — it is hard," Duranton said.

To help companies salvage their AI efforts, he said, his "golden rule" is that organizations allocate about 10% of their effort and money to the algorithms — to build AI engines or train LLMs. Another 20% should be reserved for data and technology. Essentially, that's to make the AI work in a company's tech environment, Duranton said.

The bulk of the effort — the remaining 70% — should go to changing the way people work, he said.

"Assuming you have a technology that can scale, you need to bring that into the hands of the people. It's a massive change effort," said Duranton, who's based in the company's Paris office and oversees BCG X's global army of nearly 3,000 technologists, scientists, programmers, engineers, and others.

Some companies are struggling

Companies' frustration is real. In the final months of 2024, BCG surveyed some 1,800 C-suite execs from big companies in nearly 20 countries and found that while 75% of respondents ranked AI among their top-three priorities, only 25% reported seeing "significant value" from the technology.

To find more value, Duranton recommends that companies not try to do everything all at once. He said the scope of change that companies need likely can't be achieved with tens or hundreds of use cases.

"That's not the plan. The plan is to focus on a very few things, and the things that matter," he said.

Duranton said companies sometimes also look to "incremental initiatives." He said he thinks that's often a mistake. Instead, he said, companies should home in on a few "quintessential" things.

For a retailer, Duranton said, this might be using AI to ensure a brick-and-mortar store has the perfect product mix for that location to better withstand competitors nearby and online.

Retail CEOs understand the stakes, Duranton said. They'll often tell him something like, "I know that if I don't do that better than others, I'm cooked," he said.

Duranton said another imperative for a retailer might be to develop an AI agent that can shop for customers — one that's so good that users won't want to switch to a competitor.

"With those two things, you have both a strategic agenda and an AI agenda," he said, referring to making sure inventory is dialed and the shopping bot.

The trick, then, is to keep the focus on those efforts, Duranton said.

"Those quintessentials, that's where you put all your money, all your energy," he said. That's necessary, Duranton said, if companies want to take the 10%, 20%, 70% approach he recommends.

AI's Bermuda Triangle

He said scaling AI is also often difficult because companies can feel pressure to compromise on expenses, quality of results, or the speed at which they're produced.

"You have a sort of Bermuda Triangle, where it is either costly and relevant with a good latency, or you have to compromise on one of the three, and you have to optimize," Duranton said, referring to AI results.

He said it's often easy to demonstrate some tech wizardry in a demo. What's difficult, Duranton said, is handling millions of requests every day and producing timely and relevant results.

"It's a different ballgame," he said.

Ultimately, to succeed with AI, Duranton said, companies will need to bring along people, not just bots.

"Invest in change-management, not just technology, and have your fearless and strongest leaders be in charge," he said.

• Job openings are down, and hiring is slow, making job switching risky in 2025.
• Tariffs and interest rates are also causing economic uncertainty, affecting employer hiring plans.
• This is the third installment in BI's six-part series on making major life decisions during this period of massive change.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

For many workers, that well-worn bit of folk wisdom might be the best advice for deciding whether to switch jobs in 2025.

If you have a job and aren't in a hot field like artificial intelligence, it's likely smart to stay put unless you're worried about getting cut — or are simply miserable, labor market observers told Business Insider.

In the third installment of BI's six-part series on making major life decisions in periods of immense policy-driven change, we're looking at whether now is a good time to change jobs. We've already covered best practices for starting a business and buying a house.

There are some key reasons you might want to stick it out in your current role. Among the biggies: Overall job openings are down, hiring is happening at the slowest pace in about a decade, and some employers feel jittery.

That's partly because many are facing major questions about what will happen with tariffs and interest rates. The uncertainty has spilled into financial markets, whose swings have at times been like a check engine light for the US economy.

It all adds up to a labor market that's "paralyzed," Cory Stahle, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, told BI.

"Employers are not sure if they can commit to certain hiring plans," he said.

That means if you're thinking about handing in your two weeks' notice, you likely have more to consider than only a few months ago — including how robust your network is, how many job postings there are in your field, and how well your employer is doing, Susan Peppercorn, an executive coach, told BI.

"It's not the strongest job market, but then again, it's not the weakest," she said.

Overall, job postings in the US have dropped by 5 percentage points in 2025, Stahle said.

It's not the same job market it was

Postings for white-collar roles fell by 12.7% from the first quarter of 2024 to the first quarter of 2025, according to Revelio Labs, which examines employment trends. In the same period, openings for blue-collar jobs dropped by 11.9%.

Taking a longer view, opportunities for some desk jobs are far less prevalent than during the job-hopping bonanza of a few years ago. From the Great Resignation era in early 2022 through the first quarter of 2025, postings for software developers and business analysts each fell by about 76%, while openings for market research work dropped by about 80%, Revelio found.

Yet, it's not all bad news. Stahle said that demand for workers in areas including healthcare and construction has held up. On top of that, he said, many employers that struggled to attract workers just a few years ago aren't eager to lay them off now, especially as it's unclear how long factors like the tariff morass might persist.

To know whether it's a good time to make a move, you might only need to ask someone out of work. On average, people are spending more time looking.

As of April, the median time job seekers were unemployed was a seasonally adjusted 10.4 weeks, according to the Labor Department. That's up from eight weeks in June 2022.

Switching might take time

You might be tempted to jump because, broadly, fewer of us are dialed into what we do. In 2024, the global share of engaged employees dropped to 21% from 23%, recent figures from Gallup show. That's only the second annual drop since 2009; the other was 2020, during pandemic lockdowns.

Stahle said that if you don't like your job and there aren't other options at your employer, you should be prepared for the search to take longer.

If you're unhappy in your role, you might focus on growing by adding skills or looking for other spots at your employer, Jennifer Dulski, CEO and founder of Rising Team, a team-performance platform, told BI.

If your job is at risk, or you think it might be, start searching, she said.

How to start looking for a job

Dulski said that your search should involve more than scrolling through openings. You'll need to contact people and start connecting — a term she prefers over networking.

With fewer openings and employers taking longer to bring people aboard, any edge can help.

"People need to work harder now to stand out," said Dulski, who's spent some 25 years in tech, including leadership positions at Yahoo, Google, and Facebook.

Peppercorn offered similar advice, saying that if you're in the market, you have to be able to show what makes you "unique and compelling."

How successful you're likely to be in your job search — and how quickly it plays out — will have a lot to do with your skills, she said.

Those abilities have to be well-suited for what employers want, Peppercorn said. A job change might not be hard if you're a nurse or someone developing AI tools, for example.

Ultimately, the jobs have to be there. Peppercorn said you should hope to see at least 10 open roles you could apply for and would have a reasonable shot at landing.

It also makes more sense, she said, to put in well-crafted job applications rather than go after loads of openings in hopes of getting a bite. Peppercorn also said that if a posting has more than 50 applicants, it might be worth looking elsewhere.

Perhaps above all, she said, forging ties with others will remain essential.

"What it takes to get another job is strong network connections, not what you see posted online," Peppercorn said.

Do you have a story to share about your job hunt? Contact this reporter at [email protected].

• Greg Abel's forthcoming promotion to CEO of Berkshire Hathaway offers lessons for moving up.
• If you want to get a big promotion — or just got one — there are ideas you should keep in mind.
• Experts advise Abel and others who move up to figure out what to keep and what to change.

Greg Abel, Warren Buffett's handpicked Berkshire successor, has a massive legacy to live up to.

Buffett spent 60 years transforming Berkshire Hathaway, his multinational conglomerate holding company, from a failing textile mill into a $1 trillion company.

The coming ascension of Abel, the chairperson of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, to replace Buffett is a reminder that getting a big promotion often involves a good deal of spadework. Once you get the gig, there are important things to keep in mind as you step into the role.

Business Insider asked corporate observers for their advice on pathways to getting promoted and succeeding when you do.

Find your mentors

If you're hoping to move up, it's important to find senior leaders to guide you, Andy Lopata, coauthor of "The Financial Times Guide to Mentoring," told BI in an email.

He said this might include a boss whose job you hope to one day land and other mentors who can be objective in guiding you as you forge key relationships and plan your next steps.

Stewart Friedman, an organizational psychologist and emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, told BI in an email that when he interviews job candidates, he'll ask, "How will your experience working with me contribute to your development towards your most important goals?"

It's an important consideration, Friedman said.

"If your boss isn't thinking this way, then they are not priming you for taking the steps you need to prepare for your future," he said.

Look for signs of confidence

Long before getting good news about the role you've been shooting for, you'll likely need to put in hard work and look for signs that your boss is confident that you'll succeed.

One indication you might be set to climb is if your boss trusts you with "high-stakes decisions" and not just easy wins, Deborah Grayson Riegel, who teaches leadership communication at Wharton and Columbia Business School, said in an email to BI.

If your boss asks you to stand in for them in key situations where "the stakes (and titles) are high," it can be a sign they're testing and showcasing your executive presence and credibility, she said.

Riegel said not all parts of moving up will necessarily be frictionless. A boss who views you as heir apparent might also offer candid feedback, even when it's uncomfortable. That person might also give you autonomy to lead and then support you when you stumble, "which you will," she said.

"That kind of trust signals they're preparing you for more than your current role; they're preparing you for theirs," Riegel said.

If you get the job, don't just mimic

If you're lucky enough to get the job and will soon take over, it can be important to honor your boss's legacy without mimicking it. That's the case for Abel, Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School, told BI via email.

"No one wants a replica," she said.

While Buffett led through "extreme delegation," Ibarra said, Abel is often more hands-on. She said he'll need to use his instincts to make "bold, well-judged" moves even while maintaining the company's decentralized approach.

"A successor is always chosen for a reason; Abel must understand why he won the succession contest and lead from that strength," Ibarra said.

Keep some things

Alisa Cohn, an executive coach, likewise said it's important to stake out your own position and not pretend you're the old boss. That includes not promising things will stay the same.

At the same time, she said, it can help to hold onto some aspects of leadership that are popular or have worked well.

In Abel's case, that includes Buffett's annual shareholder meeting, which has for years been a big event for investors well beyond the company, Cohn said.

Keep your colleagues' success in mind

If you're like Abel, 62, and you've been a longtime employee at a company, you've likely built up many relationships with coworkers. Moving up the ladder can change some of those dynamics.

It's important to be aware of that, Cohn said.

Rising to the position where you're in charge can lead to jealous coworkers, she said. If you're the one moving up, it's important to let your one-time peers know that their success remains important to you, Cohn said.

"Show them early that you have their backs and want to support them and help them succeed," she said.

Make your mark

Cohn said one way you can establish yourself is by demonstrating you have strong judgment. For Abel, that could include big decisions on large investments, she said.

A successful, high-profile acquisition or investment soon after his takeover would "reassure" investors and others that Berkshire's historic investment discipline remains intact, Cohn said.

She said Abel should continue to differentiate himself by ensuring the business managers are acting in the interest of the collective, "and taking action if they aren't."

Whitney Johnson, a leadership advisor, told BI in an email that leadership transitions can spread fear because of uncertainty.

"Calm the lizard brain by communicating relentlessly. Articulate what will change, but emphasize what remains constant," she said.

• The recent firing of Ashley Buchanan as Kohl's CEO included the words "terminated" and "for cause."
• Directors, at times, ditch corporate euphemisms to signal accountability and maintain credibility.
• Boards are sometimes more "emphatic" with the words they use than decades ago, one expert told BI.

"You're fired."

It's jarring for pretty much anyone to hear, but it's maybe especially hard for CEOs accustomed to calling the shots and getting kid-glove treatment.

Yet, when the top dog's transgression appears serious enough, some companies will tear up their lists of euphemisms and say it more or less plainly: We canned the big boss.

That's what happened Thursday at Kohl's. The retailer said it had decided to "terminate" Ashley Buchanan, who'd only been in the top spot for a few months, "for cause."

Kohl's said in a regulatory filing that Buchanan had directed the company to do business with a vendor started by a person with whom he had an undisclosed personal relationship.

The terse phrasing in Kohl's announcement is a reminder that corporate boards — eager to maintain credibility — will sometimes forgo their word-mincing habits, at least for what they deem to be serious matters, corporate observers told Business Insider.

The embrace of tougher language around CEO firings is most on display when there's been a perceived ethical breach or malfeasance, Donald Hambrick, a professor of management and organization at Pennsylvania State University, told BI.

"Boards now are emphatic about such dismissals, and in a way that they weren't decades ago," he said.

One reason, Hambrick said, is that boards stand to gain if they appear to be taking a no-nonsense approach.

"It's a signal that they want to be scrupulous," he said.

No time for 'softer language'

Nadya Malenko, a professor in the finance department at Boston College, told BI in an email that strong and direct language isn't unusual in cases where there's been a scandal or a clear violation of fiduciary duties.

That's different, she said, from situations where a CEO might not have been a good fit or had made strategic blunders.

"The board needs to signal that it holds misconduct accountable, and using softer language will not achieve this," Malenko said.

She said it's also often worthwhile for directors to adopt a serious tone to tamp down speculation that there's some wider problem.

In the case of Kohl's, Malenko said, the board might have decided it was better to be "crystal clear" about the reason for the firing rather than let investors wonder whether there was something more serious afoot.

She said a rise in Kohl's stock following the news could have been a sign that investors weren't happy with Buchanan's short-lived efforts to turn around the company. Another possible reason for the gain, Malenko said, might have been that investors were pleased to see the board doing its job.

Gains on Thursday and Friday pushed Kohl's shares up nearly 12% following the news.

BI attempted to reach Buchanan for comment through what appeared to be his personal email; his LinkedIn account appears to be deleted.

Kohl's didn't respond to a request for comment from BI on its choice of wording in announcing Buchanan's firing.

Retaining confidence in the board

Kathy Gersch, chief commercial officer at the change-management firm Kotter, told BI that because Buchanan was so new in the role, the board likely wanted to show investors and others that it hadn't made a bad call in assessing his abilities and, rather, that Buchanan's ouster related to what the company deemed a conflict of interest.

"The board needs to convey a sense of competence," she said, referring to its ability to hire a CEO.

Kohl's announced in November that Buchanan, who'd been running the retailer Michaels since 2020, would take over Kohl's in early 2025. In January, Kohl's, which is based near Milwaukee, reported slumping sales and said it would close more than two dozen stores.

Gersch said directors often seek a balance between not disparaging someone they're pushing out and maintaining the board's legitimacy.

"There's sort of a demand from the public and shareholders for greater degrees of transparency," she said.

Penn State's Hambrick said that with serious matters, it's good when companies dispense with corporate speak because doing so signals that boards are concerned foremost about ethics and adhering to company values and societal norms.

He said that approach helps a board maintain its reputation and that of a company.

"If they sniff out ethical misdeeds, no matter by whom, including the CEO, the person will be gone," Hambrick said.

• Neurodivergent workers could offer an important source of talent for employers looking to hire.
• One researcher estimates that as many as 1 in 5 people are neurodivergent.
• A startup, inspired by the Israeli military, seeks those with varied thinking styles to train AI.

At his old desk, Alan Price sometimes found it hard to concentrate when he saw coworkers nearby or heard their footsteps as they passed.

Now, the Bank of America employee has a spot near a corner with a window on one side. The relative solitude helps him focus, Price said. When he needs a screen break, he takes in the 11th-floor view overlooking downtown Boston.

"I get easily distracted, so sitting near the window helps me because there is less foot traffic," Price, 33, who identifies as neurodivergent, told Business Insider.

He is part of a group of more than 250 workers, some of whom often process information differently, as Price does. The team handles a range of back-office duties for the bank, including keying in hand-written credit card applications and preparing mailers.

Workers like Price represent an often-overlooked segment of the labor market that could offer an important source of talent, especially for employers trying to staff hard-to-fill roles.

While demand for desk workers in fields like tech is slowing, many employers, like manufacturers and healthcare providers, still need people for a range of roles. Advocates say catering to neurodivergent job seekers, who can include those with autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia, or ADHD, could help meet some of that need.

Some big companies, including BofA, Dell, Microsoft, and SAP, have programs designed to attract neurodivergent workers, a group the think tank American Enterprise Institute has labeled "America's largest untapped talent pool." Yet, many employers don't make overtures to this group.

1 in 5 people could be neurodivergent

Assessments vary, though one UK researcher estimates that 15% to 20% of people are "neurominorities."

For employers, the recruiting opportunity appears enormous.

Two-thirds of the neurodiverse population is highly skilled yet unemployed or underemployed, according to the University of Connecticut.

Deloitte, the auditing and consulting giant, estimates that in the US, 85% of those on the autism spectrum are unemployed.

A modest, yet growing, slice of employers is taking notice.

The share of job postings in the US that mention neurodiversity, excluding care-related roles, tripled from 0.1% at the start of 2018 to 0.3% by the end of 2024, according to findings released in March by Indeed.

Inspired by the military

One employer tapping into neurodivergent talent is Enabled Intelligence, a startup near Washington, DC. It reviews satellite images for the US military to identify and label objects like fighter jets. The data is then used to train AI models for security operations.

Peter Kant, the company's CEO and founder, told BI that about half of Enabled Intelligence's workers describe themselves as neurodivergent.

Before starting the company in 2020, he'd heard from government officials about a need for high-quality data labeling. Inspired by a unit of the Israel Defense Forces that includes servicemembers on the autism spectrum, Kant set out to recruit the workers necessary to take on detailed and routinized work.

He thought that appealing to neurodivergent workers might be a way to achieve higher quality rates for data labeling than the industry standard of 70%. Kant remembers thinking he was onto something when he met with a government client who asked Kant who was doing his firm's work.

"They were like, 'Are you sure you don't have subject matter experts in geospatial imagery?" he said.

Kant explained that a specialist had trained the Enabled Intelligence workers, but that his team had only been working for three months. Then, the client dropped the news.

"They said, 'Well, you're at 97% accuracy,'" Kant said.

Kant said the cognitive diversity within the company's teams results in more robust AI.

"If you only have one type of human brain or thought process labeling the data, then you're only going to have one approach for that AI, and you have an AI that doesn't work all the time," Kant said.

Navigating the workplace

Bringing more neurodivergent workers into the fold could require that some employers think differently about their workplaces. People identifying as neurodivergent have shared stories online about the challenges of cacophonous open-plan offices or hot-desking, where employees don't have assigned spots.

Awareness of those concerns, and the need to provide different types of workspaces to accommodate a range of workers, is growing, Neil Murray, global CEO of real estate management services at the commercial real estate firm JLL, told BI.

"Our clients are figuring neurodiversity into their planning, into their occupancy planning, into their layouts like never before, he said.

That's something Travis Hollman has seen in conversations with Fortune 500 companies, universities, and workplace design firms, he said. In 2024, his Dallas-area company, MeSpace, began marketing booths for people who want an escape from open-plan spaces without being in a soundproof box.

Hollman, whose childhood struggles with attention deficit disorder and dyslexia included failing third grade because of difficulty reading, told BI that doing more to support neurodivergent workers could be a "game changer."

Hollman said that without the right accommodations, some neurodivergent workers might quit or be fired, for example, because they can't focus.

"You've got to put them in this position to win," he said.

Building skills

At BofA's Support Services group, where Price works, many of the tasks the workers take on are ones the company once sent to vendors, Mark Feinour, the unit's executive director, told BI.

"We can do it more efficiently and more accurately," he said. Feinour oversees teams in Boston, Dallas, and Belfast, Maine, that handle some 27 million items annually for the bank's customers.

For Price, who has a degree in math and who's always wanted to work in an office, the chance to take on new challenges has kept his more than seven years at BofA interesting. That's included helping train new hires.

"I learn and I grow all the time here," Price said. "It's been great."

Do you have a story about your experience as a neurodivergent worker? Contact this reporter at [email protected].

• Nico Beedle cofounded a boutique law firm in London in 2016.
• Unlike many, Merali Beedle's senior lawyers decide their own caseload and keep 75% of billings.
• Beedle told BI that letting lawyers have greater autonomy often improves their work-life balance.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Nico Beedle, 41, a lawyer who lives in London and cofounded the boutique firm Merali Beedle in 2016. The firm now has more than 70 lawyers. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.

I started my career at a big international firm in the city and then moved to a more boutique, but still pretty big, traditional firm. Both are very good, but when I was in my early 30s, I was really fed up with being a lawyer.

Adam Merali, my business partner, had set up a law firm because he needed legal services for some of his other business interests.

Like me, Adam had been fed up with being a lawyer because he felt he had too little control over his work and was not properly rewarded for his time.

At that point, he and I had been friends for about 20 years. I had quit law to work out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Adam asked if I wanted to be a consultant for him on the side, and I agreed.

In a traditional law firm, you have a partnership where the people at the top own it. They employ everyone else. The owners then take the profits, minus the overhead.

Adam's view, in terms of what we would do as a firm, was to use a fee-share model where lawyers are heavily incentivized for what they do, which was very unusual in the legal market. That's what makes us different from the vast majority of other firms.

Suddenly, Adam and I were really enjoying being lawyers again, because rather than someone slamming some work on your desk and saying, "Do this," it was a case of someone saying, "Do you want X thousand pounds to do this bit of work for me?"

About a decade ago, Adam and I said we should commit to this full time — and see if other people wanted to work with us on the same basis.

What sets us apart

Our model, in a nutshell, is that we have a brilliant operational team who are our employees. We then recruit senior lawyers, who aren't salaried, and instead take home 75% of what they bill. By contrast, traditional firms tend to pay about 25% to 30% of what someone bills as salary.

In terms of how the world has changed and how I think people view their careers, the traditional model was very much a case of, "You do your time and you'll be rewarded" — to the point at which you're overrewarded.

I think millennials like me and Gen Z are generally less willing to make that trade, which is to have less control earlier in their career in the hope of a payoff.

Now, once you make partner, you still have to work really hard, if not harder. Back in the day, partners might have been in the bar or on the golf course.

A few years ago, someone made an analogy I really like: In traditional law, becoming a partner is like a pie-eating contest where the prize is more pies. If you become an equity partner, you're making a lot of money, but there's no taking your foot off the gas.

My perspective is that careers and where people work are more fluid than they used to be. People aren't looking to work their way up for the rest of their lives. I think people, on the whole, are less willing to deal with suffering and levels of stress that aren't particularly healthy.

At our firm, it's helpful knowing that you're not being judged by benchmarks and that you're just doing your own thing. We have some brilliant lawyers who are parents of young kids who may be billing 20% compared to someone who is absolutely going for it and wants to join our model because they're going to take home a lot of money.

Both of those individuals are equally important in terms of the culture of the business. And many early hires were via our flexible working platform, which champions women in the workplace. It's very difficult for women after having children to get back into big law, especially at the more senior level, because you might be looking for fixed hours, you might be looking for four days a week. This is not a criticism of those firms, but the nature of our industry doesn't favor those kinds of conditions.

We say to someone, "Do as much as you feel comfortable with," and they fit it around their life.

Finding happiness

Many of the people we've had join us have been friends with or ex-colleagues of people who already work for us. We've grown nicely over the last 10 years. We could be at least twice or three times this size if we'd taken a more aggressive hiring policy and maybe dropped the quality levels a little bit.

The fact that we've kept quality high and tended to hire people our lawyers already know has been really helpful with the cultural side of things.

Recently, one of our lawyers came up to me and asked if I could take on something for him. He's done the same when I've asked. But compared with traditional law firms, he's not putting something on my desk that I don't want to be doing. I'm going to make some money from it, and he doesn't have to take on more work that makes him more stressed. It's like a grown-up trade.

If you ask my friends or family about how I seem to be doing in my life since I changed jobs, it's so different. That ripple effect of not being miserable in your job is huge.

• Smaller, boutique consulting firms are leveraging AI to compete with established players.
• Many of these firms have a narrow focus, like helping clients with pricing or cost-cutting.
• Their methods aim to make consulting accessible to a broader range of clients.

Two sets of players have long ruled the consulting world.

There is MBB, which is McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company, and Boston Consulting Group. And then there is the Big Four: PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and Ernst & Young.

But now, a new wave of upstarts fueled by AI is attempting to chip away at that dominance.

Many of the founders of these new firms come from the traditional consulting realm. They told Business Insider their experiences not only give them marketable skills but have also helped them identify new opportunities in the industry.

They are boutique firms. They are much smaller than the established ones, often run by teams ranging from just a few people to a few hundred. They're also more specialized, focusing on areas like pricing strategy, cost reduction, or refining slide decks.

And, importantly, they are all in on AI.

Many of them said their methods have helped them reduce old-school bureaucracy, offer more competitive rates, and make the human side of consulting work easier.

Here are eight boutique firms that are, to varying degrees, challenging the classic consulting model.

Xavier AI

Xavier AI describes itself as the world's first AI strategy consultant.

According to Joao Filipe, cofounder of Xavier and a former McKinsey consultant, the Xavier AI chatbot can provide clear, actionable business knowledge and deliverables, like a 60-page business plan, a sales presentation, or a detailed marketing strategy.

Filipe said Xavier AI has its own proprietary reasoning engine that is tailor-made for business use cases and can provide detailed sources without the hallucination you might find with other chatbots. He said Xavier can provide both strategy recommendations and actionable plans for implementation.

"99.9% of businesses could really never afford McKinsey or any of the MBBs," Filipe told BI. "We created Xavier AI so that anyone could have the power of a consulting firm at their hands when they need it."

Xavier AI just launched, but Filipe said he's been piloting it with different clients, including an international bank using it to research potential clients and better understand their needs.

Perceptis

Alibek Dostiyarov, a former McKinsey consultant, and Yersultan Sapar, a former engineer at Apple, cofounded Perceptis.

The company aims to help smaller and midsize firms compete with bigger industry players by using AI to streamline some of the more tedious processes in consulting, like proposal writing.

Perceptis is now focused on the business development side of consulting. Its AI-powered operating system can do industry research, identify opportunities that align with their client's skillset and background, and create detailed, custom proposals that the client can use to win a job.

Dostiyarov told BI earlier this year that a lot of the internal processes completed at consulting firms are heavy with manual labor and "lend themselves almost perfectly to what GenAI is capable of doing."

He also said Perceptis could make smaller firms, which don't typically have internal AI tools, more competitive in the market.

The company told BI this week that while initially serving boutique management consultancies, it's now quickly expanding to serve IT services, system integrators, software developers, financial services, design firms, and real estate agencies.

Perceptis had raised $3.6 million in funding as of January.

SIB

SIB specializes in helping clients like restaurant groups, hospitals, universities, and government agencies find savings in fixed costs — expenses that remain static regardless of how much a company produces.

SIB CEO Shannon Copeland told BI that these are often found in areas that "escape scrutiny," like fees for telecommunications, utilities, waste removal, shipping, and software licenses. According to his LinkedIn profile, Copeland is an alum of Accenture and Deloitte.

SIB has grown since its 2008 launch in Charleston, South Carolina. It's now a national firm serving hundreds of clients, ranging from Kroger and Marriott to governments like San Diego County. It recently added over a dozen Fortune 500 companies and private equity firms. Since its launch, SIB says it has identified more than $8 billion in cost savings.

Copeland said that, unlike traditional consulting firms, SIB operates under a contingency model. "If we don't find savings, we don't get paid," he said, adding that the firm doesn't charge fees upfront.

SIB uses AI agents to monitor invoices, vendor contracts, and billing patterns. The firm's consultants use the resulting insights to negotiate better contract terms or restructure their vendor relationships.

"You could think of us as part AI, part old-school operator," Copeland said.

In addition to cost-cutting, the firm also focuses on strengthening relationships, a cornerstone of traditional consulting.

"We actually encourage vendors and clients to return to high-trust, high-accountability partnerships by using data as the starting point for better collaboration," Copeland said. "Working with robots actually makes humans listen to each other more. It's ironic, but it works."

Monevate

Monevate's motto is simple — focus on one thing and do it well.

The firm focuses on pricing strategy for software-as-a-service and high-growth tech companies. It also works with private equity firms to assess the commercial viability of potential investments.

According to his LinkedIn profile, James Wilton, an alum of McKinsey, Kearney, and ZS Associates, founded Monevate in 2021. Wilton now serves as the Firm's managing partner. The firm has 16 full-time consultants and has helped over 50 SaaS, tech, and AI companies in the past three years.

"Most of our clients are backed by venture capital or private equity, and increasingly, we're working with teams building AI products and features," Wilton told BI by email.

Wilton said clients usually turn to Monevate when they've hit a wall with their current strategy because their product has changed or the market has evolved. "We design and implement fully-baked pricing strategies, including packaging, price architecture, and price levels," he said.

Wilton said the impetus to launch the firm came from the gaps he saw in traditional consulting. "Clients often complained about recommendations that never went anywhere, high fees that only the largest companies could afford, no skin in the game, inflexible delivery models, and highly variable service quality depending on the team," he said.

Monevate keeps its focus narrow, but that's allowed even its most junior consultants to become "deep pricing experts," Wilton said.

He added that the firm's work is "narrow by consulting standards, and it means walking away from other kinds of work, but it allows us to be truly great at what we do."

Keystone

Keystone is a strategy consulting firm that advises technology companies, life science companies, governments, and law firms. Its clients include major corporations like Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Intel, Novartis, and Pfizer.

The firm was founded in 2003 by Greg Richards, a mechanical engineer by training and an alum of Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, who now serves as an advisor to Harvard Business School, and Marco Iansiti, a physicist and professor at Harvard Business School.

Iansiti told BI that Keystone tends to be more "geeky and nerdy" than traditional consulting firms. "We love to kind of get deep on the tech side of things," he said. The team includes data scientists, AI experts, and academics.

While many consulting firms are embracing generative AI, which is often used to automate day-to-day work like writing emails or reviewing documents and contracts, Iansiti said Keystone is focusing more on operational AI.

Operational AI is used to transform core business functions like managing supply chains, inventory, pricing, and forecasting. In 2023, the firm launched "CoreAI," a team dedicated to using AI to automate and improve these areas.

"We get excited about the term deep enterprise on this," Iansiti said. "Deep enterprise is really the idea of using deep learning models that are embedded around crucial operating processes in the enterprise."

The firm's "value add," he said, lies in building this kind of "pretty unique operational AI" for its clients.

Fusion Collective

Fusion Collective is an IT consulting firm that offers a range of consulting services to clients, including strategy and management advice, cloud transformation, and AI alignment.

The firm was founded by Blake Crawford, who worked on enterprise architecture at MTV Networks and Viacom, and Yvette Schmitter, an alum of Deloitte, PwC, and Amazon Web Services, where she led three cloud migrations, including the largest in the company's history.

Schmitter said that in her experience, clients are seeking AI advice from consulting firms before they're ready.

"We have organizations who are running at 99 miles an hour, hiring these firms to build these AI strategy documents, 165 pages of beautiful PowerPoints, right?" she said. But these companies still can't "operationalize" AI, she said. "Why? Because the basic infrastructure isn't there. Any type of vulnerability that they have in security, their cloud infrastructure, is just exacerbated by AI."

In the end, clients chose consultants based on trust, their networks, and existing business relationships, she said.

"I really believe that a true partner is one who's going to tell you the truth. Tell it like it is even if it hurts right?" Schmitter said. To that end, she said she asks clients who come to her about AI strategy to have a solid grasp of their infrastructure footprint, data governance policies, and security before they accelerate adoption.

The bottom line is that Fusion Collective likes to keep its advice real. "If companies have not mastered the fundamentals, you're not ready for AI, and you're not ready for an army of consultants to come in to do stuff," Schmitter said.

Slideworks

Slideworks isn't necessarily going after consulting firms' business, though it focuses on something many of the big guys are known for: making powerful slides.

Slideworks offers what it calls "high-end" PowerPoint templates and "toolkits" created by former consultants for Bain, BCG, and McKinsey.

When you work as a consultant at a top-tier firm, "you are schooled every day in best practice presentations and slide design," the company says on its website. The idea is to offer access to a library of slides and spreadsheets for areas including strategy, supply chain management, and "digital transformation."

In a February blog post, Alexandra Hazard Kampmann, a Slideworks partner, wrote that "management consultants are often made fun of as 'slide monkeys.'" Yet, she added, the slide is a "crucial reason" why McKinsey and BCG consultants have so many Fortune 500 companies as clients.

Slideworks offers a "consulting toolkit," which contains 205 slides and costs $129. It also offers a "consulting proposal," which has 242 slides plus an Excel model and costs $149.

There are also operations, mergers and acquisitions, business strategy, and product strategy templates.

Slideworks says it has more than 4,500 customers globally, including Coca-Cola, Pfizer, and the professional-services firms Deloitte and EY.

Unity Advisory

Some top UK executives from Ernst & Young and PwC are joining forces to launch a new firm called Unity Advisory in June, the Financial Times reported. The firm will be chaired by Steve Varley, who spent nearly 19 years at EY, and led by CEO Marissa Thomas, who worked at PwC for over 30 years, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

It is backed by up to $300 million from Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm, and will focus on tax and accounting services, technology consulting, and mergers and acquisitions.

"CFOs are open to a new proposition," Varley told the FT. "The Big Four are a classy bunch of service providers, but people are looking for a proposition that is super client-centric, has really low administrative cost, is AI-led rather than based on legacy infrastructure and, crucially, has no conflicts."

• Jennifer Dulski was hiring for a chief of staff role at her company, Rising Team.
• Three of the 800 applications she and her team reviewed stood out for giving something extra.
• Applications that go "above and beyond" can boost job seekers who lack a big professional network.

Between running her own firm and years of leadership roles in tech, Jennifer Dulski has done a lot of hiring.

In June 2024, she posted a job for a chief of staff at her company, Rising Team. The listing quickly drew over 800 applications.

Dulski and her team sifted through all of them. Three were outliers.

Each of those that popped included something extra, Dulski, Rising Team's founder and CEO, told Business Insider. One person attached a slide deck, while another included a video with slides, she said.

For another application, a job seeker included a "user manual," a term Dulski's company, a team-performance platform, employs. She said that phrase made it clear the applicant had gone deep when researching her Menlo Park, California, firm.

All three got an interview.

"They just stood out so much for having done the extra research, the extra work — something creative," Dulski said.

That bit of extra pizazz might be more important than it's been in years in the US because, broadly, employers are posting fewer jobs and extending offers at the slowest pace in about a decade.

The cool pace of onboarding also comes as uncertainty over tariffs and interest rates has some CEOs hitting pause on big decisions, including adding to payrolls.

Going 'above and beyond'

Dulski, whose years in tech included leadership roles at Yahoo, Google, and Facebook, said that it can make a big difference when you take the time to put together thorough and well-researched applications.

Among the finalists for the chief of staff job, several hadn't worked in that capacity before, she said.

Yet, Dulski said, "they had just gone above and beyond and made themselves so clearly capable."

She also saw the opposite: those who mailed it in. Dulski and her team didn't review applications where people just applied with a few clicks through a job board because, in doing so, they couldn't answer some questions Rising Team had asked.

Of the over 800 they went through, Dulski and the team passed on applications where a phrase like "due to my extensive experience in" made it clear that artificial intelligence did most of the work.

"They all started with essentially the same two sentences," she said.

Making an application compelling often matters because, while overall unemployment and layoffs remain low, there are fewer job openings, Cory Stahle, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, told BI. Postings in the US have dropped by 3.5 percentage points in 2025, he said.

"It's becoming a harder labor market for those who are out of a job," Stahle said.

A boost if your network is small

Dulski said a top-notch application can be especially helpful if you don't have much of a professional network to turn to during your job search. That's important because one of the best ways to land a gig has long been to tap a connection within an organization. That's still true, she said. While it won't necessarily get you the job, it might lead to an interview.

Dulski, who teaches at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and talks often with students early in their careers, still recommends that you try to connect with someone in an organization, even through cold outreach.

Yet, where that doesn't work, Dulski said, putting added effort into an application can help compensate for the lack of an in.

"The strategy of sending something extra, making yourself stand out, is accessible to everyone," she said.

Dulski said that's the case regardless of your connections, any privileges you might have, or what's on your résumé.

The basics still count

Even if you research an employer to help shape your application, you still have to nail the basics, Susan Peppercorn, an executive coach, told BI.

That means having a strong résumé and LinkedIn profile — LinkedIn is the first place a hiring manager will go to look you up, Peppercorn said. With something like your profile, you need to be clear what you want to say about yourself to stand out, she said.

"What makes you unique and compelling?" Peppercorn said.

Having a well-tailored application along with a strong résumé and dialed profile still might not guarantee you get somewhere with an employer. Yet, Dulski said, given the number of applications some postings get, job seekers often need to do something to stand apart.

Besides, she said, a well-executed application can help you show off your skills. It's also a help, Dulski said, if you don't have the exact experience listed in a job posting. Ultimately, the person Dulski hired hadn't been a chief of staff before.

While the hire wasn't one of those who added something extra to their application, Dulski shared her finalists with other business leaders, which resulted in several applicants getting interviews at other companies.

"Great talent will still get jobs, even in the hardest of job markets," she said.

• Elon Musk plans to reduce his time on government work to focus more on Tesla.
• Even reducing his time with DOGE could still make it hard to oversee a half dozen companies.
• Investors are often OK with "multi-CEOs" when things go well, but that can change if sales slide.

Even if Elon Musk cuts back his work reshaping the US government, he'll still be a busy guy.

And perhaps he's too busy — and controversial — to run the many companies under his domain as well as he could, leadership observers told Business Insider.

Musk, who said Tuesday he plans to soon reduce his time working on the Department of Government Efficiency, still has half a dozen companies to oversee, including Tesla, X, xAI, and SpaceX.

It adds up to a lot, especially when, like at Tesla, there are challenges like slumping sales.

"It's hard to imagine there's enough time in a week to really give each of those the attention that it needs," Christopher Myers, the faculty director of the Center for Innovative Leadership at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, told BI, referring to Musk's companies.

Myers said that while Musk has long been exceptional in his ability to run multiple entites at once, keeping a hand in DOGE one to two days a week, as Musk suggested he might, means there still won't be all that much time for him to go deep on reviving sales at Tesla, where auto revenues dropped 20% in the first quarter.

Even if Musk devoted all his time outside DOGE to the automaker, doing anything only two to three days a week would be a "minimal investment," Myers said.

Downshifting might not be enough

Another big challenge: Musk's involvement with DOGE is turning off some would-be buyers of Tesla vehicles. That means that simply giving over more time to the company might not be enough to fix its problems, Lorenz Graf-Vlachy, a professor of strategic management and leadership at Germany's TU Dortmund University, told BI.

Investors appeared buoyed by the idea that Musk would spend more time thinking about the company and less on Washington, DC. Tesla shares, which have tumbled in 2025, rose more than 5% on Wednesday.

Graf-Vlachy, who researches leaders who run more than one company — rare breeds he calls "multi-CEOs" — said investors are often OK with chiefs juggling more than one commitment when things are going well.

"As long as everybody's getting rich, nobody asks exactly how that's happening," he said.

But when business goes south, investors' confidence can erode, Graf-Vlachy said.

Even one of Tesla's biggest bulls, who has remained upbeat throughout the company's year of declining sales, said the EV maker faces a "code-red situation" if Musk stays at DOGE.

"Musk needs to leave the government, take a major step back on DOGE, and get back to being CEO of Tesla full-time," Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note on Sunday.

Musk didn't respond to a request for comment Wednesday from BI.

Myers said that another challenge for Musk is that he's described himself not as a micromanager but as an even more hands-on "nano-manager."

"It seems hard to nano-manage that many companies across that wide of a range," Myers said.

He said it's possible that Musk's other companies, beyond Tesla, would have to take "more of a back seat" or that others within those organizations would have to further step up if Musk continues to devote even limited time to DOGE.

Myers said it might have been easier to see how a single CEO could simultaneously run two tech-focused entities, like Tesla and SpaceX. Yet the management playbook can get blurry when the scope of a CEO's focus widens. In Musk's case, he's waded into government work and acquired Twitter, which he renamed X.

By having such a diverse portfolio, Myers said, it's possible that Musk has made it harder for employees at his companies to discern a clear sense of mission.

He said a Tesla employee, for example, might worry about the hit that tariffs could have on the company. Musk, who has said he favors free trade, could be put in difficult positions, Myers said.

"Depending on which of his offices is releasing the press release, they're going to take wildly different stances on the role of tariffs," he said, referring to DOGE and the White House's position on tariffs.

"That can be frustrating, confusing, and certainly demotivating for individuals within those organizations," Myers said of Musk's companies.

Multihyphenate CEOs aren't new

Musk isn't the first CEO to face scrutiny for wearing more than one hat. In 2020, shareholders and activist investors questioned whether Jack Dorsey could run Twitter and Block, both public companies, simultaneously.

Yet the Musk universe is far larger, with federal contracts, over a trillion dollars, and thousands of employees at stake.

Jonathan Marshall, an executive coach and former assistant professor at the National University of Singapore, said it is possible to run multiple companies effectively.

"Giving clear direction and having capable people under you whom you trust makes a huge difference. It permits the leader to step back," he said.

Marshall said in the best cases, executives under a busy CEO can step up — but the setup can go wrong, too.

"In one case, I've seen it lead to tremendous inefficiency as the executives felt they couldn't make a decision without the CEO's approval," he said. "But where there has been clear direction from a trusted and competent substitute for the CEO, I've seen it go well."

In 2018, Harvard Business School's then-dean examined how CEOs spend their time, writing that a CEO's calendar "is a manifestation of how the leader leads and sends powerful messages to the rest of the organization."

Non-work activities, he wrote, could represent a distraction, so CEOs should "carefully restrict" their time on community and social engagements.

Graf-Vlachy said that even though Musk has proven himself capable of overseeing several companies, there are limits to how far the multi-CEO can push himself.

"There are only 7 days a week, even for Elon Musk," he said.

• Megan Gluth balances her CEO role with teaching yoga near her home at least once a week.
• Business leaders' routines for managing stress are even more important during times of uncertainty.
• Other CEOs told BI they turn to time outdoors, walking, and "purposeful scrolling."

Megan Gluth has something many other CEOs don't: a side gig.

While Gluth's day job is running Catalynt Solutions, a distributor and producer of chemicals used in everything from soft drinks to shampoo and paint, she teaches yoga at least once a week at a studio near her home outside Seattle.

"Everybody thinks it's kind of funny that I have a part-time job," she told Business Insider.

That side hustle is proving useful. Because of uncertainty over tariffs, she's had to pull back on some investments that Catalynt had planned. Gluth, 44, has also had to have difficult conversations with clients about price hikes resulting from import duties.

Those types of discussions, plus being a mother to kids ages 6 and 8, make her days stressful. To help endure it all, she relies on the yoga and is a "committed meditator."

Like Gluth, many CEOs have long found ways to deal with taxing days that often spill into evenings and weekends. Indeed, having bosses share self-care routines became popular during the pandemic as managers sought to discuss coping mechanisms with workers amid the Zooms and sourdough starter.

Now, as questions swirl about how tariffs might collide with the economy, wellness routines are again serving as important tools to help dial down stress, Gluth and other chiefs told BI.

Keeping a balanced life

Keith Lambert founded and runs Oxidizers, a company that sells pollution-control equipment and services to industrial sites around the US. He's also the CEO of InCheq, which helps organizations manage critical tasks. Running two companies keeps him busy.

Luckily, Lambert is a morning guy — some days he's out of bed by 3:30 a.m. "The moment I'm up, I'm moving," Lambert said.

That movement helps him remain calm, he said. Lambert has plenty of conference calls and, when he has to, sits in front of a camera. Otherwise, he's on his feet and, when the weather allows, is on his phone while walking through his neighborhood outside Chicago.

"When I can, I keep myself in motion," Lambert, 55, said.

Besides walking, he starts his days reading scripture. Lambert also makes time for friends and, especially, his wife, the couple's son, and their dog, a wheaten terrier-poodle mix known as a whoodle.

"I guess you could say I do my best to practice a balanced life," Lambert said.

Time in the woods

Michelle Volberg, founder and CEO of the startup Twill, often finds balance in the woods near her home outside New York City. She enjoys "forest bathing, " a practice that originated in Japan and involves being in nature to boost well-being.

Volberg told BI that once or twice a week, she'll try to find 45 minutes for a hike with her husband. Time beneath the canopy, where her phone often falls silent due to a lack of signal, means she can do some of her best strategic thinking, she said.

On the hikes, when Volberg does tap at her phone, it's mostly to collect ideas for her company, which pays tech workers to recommend peers for key jobs.

"That completely grounds me and calms me with all of the chaos that generally surrounds founders and CEOs," Volberg, 38, said, referring to time outside without distractions.

She also relies on a community of women who, like her, run venture-backed startups. Volberg is part of a group of about 500 women who belong to the organization VC Backed Moms. Its members often communicate through a Slack group to trade ideas and share information. It's generally all off the record, she said.

She said it's helpful to learn how others are handling various situations.

"The more perspectives you can get on a situation, the better off you are to make your own decision," Volberg said.

Starting with 'purposeful scrolling'

Technology also helps Kyle Hanslovan, cofounder and CEO of Huntress, a cybersecurity firm. Most mornings, he said, he'll spend about an hour in bed engaging in "purposeful scrolling."

Hanslovan, 39, tends to start with Instagram to catch up on his personal life, move to LinkedIn for insights on topics like business and history, and end on X, where he reads various news and finds diverse opinions.

"I need stuff that is still mentally stimulating that is not work," he told BI, referring to his use of social media.

While social media often gets a bad rap, he says, rather than ratcheting up his stress, he's pruned his feeds so they offer good insights. Hanslovan often texts himself links to some of his favorite nuggets.

Some, like quotes from famed boxer Muhammad Ali or Steve Jobs, make their way into the "Townhall Tuesday" companywide meetings he runs.

Hanslovan, an Air Force veteran, has a gym at his Jacksonville, Florida, home, so he makes a point to work out three to five times a week. Even though he said the gym isn't a time for thinking, finding time to get his heartbeat above 170 beats a minute — with his phone nowhere near him — is "so damn important."

Responding, not reacting

Each week, in her hatha yoga class, Gluth from Catalynt Solutions, guides participants on breath work and meditation.

Meditation and yoga help her maintain a mindset of "responding rather than reacting." Gluth sees that approach as a hallmark of leadership.

She takes staying focused seriously, in part because she has dozens of people working for her.

"I have 55 families, essentially, that depend on me every day to not lose my shit," Gluth said. "I need to be centered, and I need to be balanced."

• Some CEOs are using the word "pause" when they talk about their businesses and decision-making.
• In some cases, it follows the tariff hiatus that President Donald Trump announced using the word.
• It's a way to convey enormous uncertainty while remaining hopeful that greater clarity will come.

Welcome to the great pause.

From smaller firms to giants like Morgan Stanley, some CEOs are reaching for the word "pause" as the term of the moment.

It's hardly surprising to see it get a C-suite glow-up.

The word received star treatment earlier this month when President Donald Trump announced a 90-day hiatus for some tariffs. His April 9 declaration in a Truth Social post featured an all-caps "PAUSE" as the operative word. It was enough to send stock market indexes rocketing to their best day in years after a string of steep losses.

Now, besides using it as shorthand for the partial tariff reprieve, some CEOs appear to be offering the word as a balm — a blend of prudence and veins of hope that the grinding uncertainty about the fallout from tariffs won't last too long.

Keith Lambert, CEO of Oxidizers, a company near Los Angeles that provides pollution-control equipment and services to industrial sites around the US, told Business Insider that because of the unknowns about the impact of tariffs, his company and many of the firm's clients feel compelled to be cautious.

For Oxidizers, which Lambert said did more than $20 million in sales in 2024, and some customers, vigilance means not moving too aggressively in areas like hiring, he said.

"Right now, it's just that pregnant pause of 'OK, wait, let's see,'" Lambert said.

For many businesses, unpredictability about the economic price tag of trade barriers can paralyze decision-making, Joe Galvin, the chief research officer at the executive-coaching firm Vistage, previously told BI.

The choices that might be easier — and not require a time out — are ones that reduce risk.

Catalynt Solutions, a company near Seattle that distributes and makes chemicals used in products from soft drinks to paint, is holding off on capital spending projects and some investments in technology and services because of uncertainty over tariffs, CEO Megan Gluth told BI.

"We're just putting pause on signing all those contracts right now because we just don't know," she said, referring to the impact of tariffs. Catalynt had $91 million in sales in 2024, the company said.

'Pause versus delete'

As unwelcome as it might be, CEOs could say much worse than the P-word.

Ted Pick, who runs Morgan Stanley, told investors on April 11 that while uncertainty and swings in financial markets have slowed some corporate rights of passage like initial public offerings, sentiment around such transitions, for now, appears to have landed on "pause versus delete."

As a verb or a noun, pause has emerged as a clutch term for some businesses navigating murky waters.

A day after Trump's April 2 Rose Garden speech detailing his intentions around the levies, the industrial technology company Acuity said in an earnings call with investors that it viewed tariffs as "the equivalent of a supply shock."

CEO Neil Ashe, discussing the Atlanta company's lighting business, also said in the call that Acuity would "take a pause" while it digested the tariffs.

In some cases, the word took center stage even before Trump announced the particulars of the tariffs.

BGSF, a Plano, Texas, staffing firm that operates across the US, told investors in mid-March that it was seeing "a lot of activity" in the company's pipeline. CEO Beth Garvey also said in the earnings call that there had been a "slight pause" to the hopefulness that followed the US presidential election but that, broadly, "there's a cautious optimism out there."

GreenFirst Forest Products, a Canadian lumber company, also said in a mid-March investor call that it was prudent to "pause certain elements" of its plans to study the impact of the soon-to-come tariffs and safeguard the company's balance sheet.

Taking it slow with big decisions

One reason some companies might be pausing on pause as a turn of phrase is that it's a simple way to convey that they're taking a beat before making weighty decisions that could appear rash in only a few months' time.

Rejiggering supply lines, for example, is often difficult and expensive, so CEOs don't tend to make those calls overnight, Erin McLaughlin, a senior economist at The Conference Board, told BI. Instead, she said, business leaders often make those decisions three to seven years in advance.

McLaughlin said that even with a three-month halt to some tariffs, many medium and large businesses that make up the nonprofit's membership are still grappling with uncertainty — and some have decided to hold off on major decisions.

She said many CEOs want to better understand "the why and the end game" of the tariffs. Knowing that, McLaughlin said, could allow companies to ease up on the brakes and resume "a normal decision-making paradigm."

A lasting delay could become problematic.

Morgan Stanley's Pick said that if adjusting to new economic conditions takes too long, the appetite for corporate activity such as mergers could fade to where "the pause effectively becomes a relook and the books get put away."

For now, though, the term is still doing yeoman's work, including in relation to dealmaking.

"I am of the view that we are still on pause. We don't know whether the economy is going to contract," Pick said on the April 11 investor call.

• Matthew Hassett is the founder and CEO of Loftie, which makes digital clocks and lamps in China.
• The company is facing tariffs above 100% on the goods it imports to the US.
• Hassett is trying to boost Loftie's software business so it has time to adjust its supply chain.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Matthew Hassett, the CEO of Loftie, a company whose products include a digital clock and lamp designed to promote sound sleep. The company, which he founded in New York City in 2018, makes its products in China. Because tariffs are pushing the company's costs higher, Hassett hopes to boost Loftie's subscription software business to give the company time to rework its supply chain before inventory runs out — perhaps as soon as May. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.

We're a family-owned business and haven't raised much in venture capital. We've had a lot of growth, but we're still pretty small even though we've sold over 150,000 Loftie clocks. Now, the tariffs have completely blown out our whole business model.

Because of existing tariffs, the levy on our clock is 149%, and on the lamp, it's 175%. We're paying more in tariffs than we are for the actual product and don't have the ability to absorb that, so we have to pass it on to customers.

The tariff on our lamp, which sells for $274.99, would be over $100. So, unless we increased the price, we would lose money on every product we sold.

Our focus is, for the time being, to become more of a software company. We were slowly building that business, which uses artificial intelligence to create unique bedtime stories and meditations. We're now racing to add features, like app blocking and routine-setting, to make it even more of a stand-alone product.

We have over 12,000 subscribers. We want to grow that 10 times this year. Subscription revenue is how I can definitively keep this company afloat and, ideally, avoid layoffs. That's my top priority.

I need revenue to pay our employees, and I can count on that revenue through software because, at least for now, there's no tariff on it.

The challenge is having the resources to make this hard pivot under such a constrained timeline — essentially shifting our entire business in 60 days.

I'd still like to be a manufacturer

I still plan to make our hardware products. But until there is clarity about where we can make them at prices people would be willing to pay, I cannot count on that being a business model that will sustain our company.

We still have inventory in China. I recently saw that a container had left the factory on its way to the port. I asked the freight forwarder to turn the truck around when I saw that we'd be paying way more in duties than the value of those goods, which included more than 500 of our lamps. We would be losing money on everything we sold in that container.

I would love to manufacture in the United States, but there are no factories that could do what ours in China does and many of the components are only made there.

As a small business, I cannot go out and create a factory in the US — even if there was a labor force willing to work in such a factory, which I don't believe there is. So, this talk of "just manufacture in America" is dead on arrival for me, because it's impossible.

Funding challenges

I've been very fortunate to have family and friends, mostly, who've supported the business and invested in it. We did our first institutional investment last year. For a while, I was paying myself about $6,000 a year. Now, it's up to $40,000 annually. At one point, I liquidated my retirement accounts to keep the company going.

We were poised to double our revenue this year. We finally got good long-term inventory financing, which has been a huge challenge. That financing switches from an interest-only period starting in May. I'm going to have to renegotiate with our lenders to push that back while we figure out how to generate the revenue to repay the loan. I'm also potentially going to need additional debt to pay for the lost revenue.

One of the craziest things that happened last week was that I learned that we're no longer eligible for a Small Business Administration loan we'd been working on for months. It was going to be secured by the company's assets and my sister's house, which she was gracious enough to offer as collateral to help us get the loan.

The reason we were denied is that 1.5% of the company is owned by my 83-year-old Irish godfather and two friends from South Africa. There was a recent rule change at the SBA that 100% of the ownership has to be US citizens or green card holders.

So, while the government is completely destroying my business model, they are also not lending to us because 1.5% of the company is owned by non-US people.

It's very easy to write off China when you're in a nationalist mindset and think that, somehow, those are jobs that we're not getting. Yet, there is already low unemployment in the US, so how do we imagine we could replace China's manufacturing capacity here?

When the president talks about some short-term pain for long-term gain, it doesn't necessarily track with small businesses because we often don't have the savings to get through that short-term pain.

It's just so intense right now. I'm grateful to my team, who are managing to stay somewhat heads-down and work on the course that I've charted out to become more of a software company in the next one to two months.

The White House didn't respond to a request for comment from Business Insider about the effects of tariffs on small businesses.

Do you have a story to share about the effect of tariffs on your business? Contact this reporter at [email protected].

• Financial market volatility is ratcheting up some workers' stress and making it hard to focus.
• One CEO uses humor to manage tension amid trade war and recession fears.
• Bosses can help by modeling calm behavior and checking up on workers, a leadership coach told BI.

As a CEO, Terry MacCauley often reaches for a joke when things get stressful in the office.

He's been doing that more lately, as fears of a trade war and possible recession have clients calling the marketing and advertising firm he started more than a decade ago near St. Louis.

"Just having a wonderful day at work, with the stock market tickers on in the background. No big deal," MacCauley wrote on April 4th on X as the Dow Jones Industrial Average skidded toward a loss of more than 2,200 points on the day.

The gallows humor was a tacit acknowledgment that keeping calm and carrying on is often hard, especially for those whose work involves a lot of screentime. Our computers — to say nothing of our phones — can pile up with news updates that tweak our fight-or-flight responses.

Weeks of whipsaws in financial markets and uncertainty about the economy is making it hard for some bosses and workers to keep both eyes on their work and not, say, on their 401(k). Yet finding a way to push ahead is key, even though it's often difficult.

"I am a new mom who is also working, so it has been very stressful and difficult to focus!" a woman who said she lives in Buffalo, New York, and gave her name as Erika, told Business Insider in a message. She declined to give her full name because she wanted to maintain privacy.

Erika is worried about tariffs hurting her employer's supply chain, though her primary concern, she said, is the big swings on Wall Street. Beyond that, Erika is fretful that the public libraries, like the one where she likes to take her daughter, will face funding cuts.

Taking a breath

MacCauley manages to forge ahead in a topsy-turvy news environment partly because the developments on tariffs have made his Chesterfield, Missouri, company, Big Time Advertising & Marketing, busier, he told BI.

MacCauley set up the firm, which caters to automotive dealerships, after years of selling cars himself.

He said clients had been calling to ask whether they should pause their marketing spending to help preserve cash because of tariff costs. The inquiries have given his 10-person team plenty to do.

MacCauley said he's tried to remind his team that it was too early to tell what the tariff impacts might be. He compared it to receiving a tornado warning and taking shelter — a not-uncommon occurrence in the Midwest.

"You go to your basement, and you don't know if you're going to come up and the house is going to be gone or it's all good," he said.

MacCauley's counsel to his team came before President Donald Trump said Wednesday he would institute a partial 90-day pause and leave tariffs, other than for China, at 10%.

In any case, finding peace — at work and beyond — isn't always easy when the news flow balloons from gardenhose to firehose.

Every 30 minutes

Matthew Hassett, founder and CEO of Loftie, which makes a lamp and digital clock designed to promote sound sleep, said frequent shifts in government policy have him sometimes checking news feeds every 30 minutes or so.

"I never consumed this much news content, and I'm an avid news reader," he told BI.

Loftie is based in New York City but manufactures its products in China because, Hassett said, the capacity to do so in the US doesn't exist.

He said he's in a Slack group for founders where participants share information, ask questions, and simply try to stay abreast of the day's developments.

"We're all just sharing information and asking questions and trying to keep up, but it also just is a huge waste of our time," Hassett said.

He tries to keep up with what's going on in part to shield his staff from having to worry about how the company will survive a tariff that, in the case of the lamp, he said amounts to 175%.

"I'm grateful to my team, who are actually managing to stay somewhat heads-down and work on the course that I've charted out," Hassett said.

Leaders can be a model

Finding a way to carve out peace in uncertain times is essential, Julie Donley, a leadership coach, told BI.

She said that when you're feeling anything at a high level, including stress, it's hard to think clearly. Lately, Donley has been hearing from some of the execs she coaches.

"They think out loud, and they get that off their chest," she said, adding that their shared goal is to have less "emotional reactivity" and calm down so they can make better decisions.

Donley, who is the author of the book "Leading at the Speed of People," said bosses need to model good behaviors and check on their teams when unsettling headlines could cause anxiety to spike.

"They may need to keep a pulse on whether someone really is freaking out," she said of leaders.

MacCauley, the ad exec, said he tries to create a culture at his company of not dwelling on what they can't control.

"We're just going to work hard and do what we do," he said.

Calming distractions can also help block the more worrisome ones. On a recent weekday, as markets tumbled, MacCauley had the TV in his office tuned to his beloved New York Yankees.

"That makes me happy, even though they're losing," he said.

• Many leaders still face uncertainty even after the White House paused some tariffs.
• The 90-day respite offers some relief yet still makes it hard for some CEOs to know how to proceed.
• One startup CEO told BI that he has to keep closer tabs on what the government is doing.

When you're a CEO with big decisions to make, 90 days can feel like an eternity.

Some leaders' relief about President Donald Trump's decision to ease up on some tariffs for three months has quickly given way to more questions.

One of the biggies: What's next?

For many CEOs, the immediate answer is more uncertainty.

The lack of clarity — and the relatively limited 90-day tariff pause that omits China — means that many corporate chiefs who are accustomed to the slow churn of government rather than more rapid-fire policymaking are likely to find it hard to settle on any big decisions.

"It is the uncertainty and the unpredictability that paralyzes decision-making," Joe Galvin, chief research officer at the executive-coaching firm Vistage, told Business Insider.

Chat Joglekar, cofounder and CEO of the startup Baton, told BI that the 90-day pause offers some relief yet doesn't make clear whether there will be changes between now and then, or what comes after that.

"What happens on day 91?" he said.

Watching the government

Other leaders appear unsure as well. Delta and Walmart pointed to that this week. Delta said economic uncertainty around global trade was hurting its business, and Walmart's CFO said the retailer is facing "day-to-day" volatility in sales.

Joglekar said that until recently, he'd never had to run his New York City company — a marketplace for buying and selling small businesses — while keeping news sites open on his computer. He said the volleys over tariffs have become something of a distraction.

"You shouldn't need to be watching a ticker for what the government is doing every single minute of the day," Joglekar said.

Financial markets tumbled anew Thursday after the White House clarified that tariffs on China are now 145%.

The level of "absolute chaos" and uncertainty — and what appears to be mercurial policymaking to critics — is likely to drive some investors and companies away from the US to areas where the view of what's ahead is less opaque and where trade barriers are lower, said Sebastien Breteau, founder and CEO of QIMA, a UK supply-chain services company that works with some 30,000 global and regional brands.

"Trump wanted 'America first.' A lot of people say it will be 'America alone.' I think it will be 'America shrunk,'" he told BI.

The White House didn't respond to a request for comment from BI. Administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, have said the partial tariff pause reflects the president's negotiating strategy.

Galvin, from Vistage, said that in a March survey by the company, confidence among small-business CEOs fell by "a historic" 22.1 points in the first quarter. That followed a surge in CEO sentiment in the final three months of 2024, which included Trump's reelection.

'A defensive posture'

Galvin said that in the "rising tide" decade of 2010 to 2020 — until the pandemic arrived — CEOs could make decisions with a reasonable degree of certainty, in part because major shifts in government policy often didn't occur in a matter of hours. Now, that's not necessarily the case, he said.

Galvin said that while tariffs are a challenge, the main problems are uncertainty and unpredictability. That makes it hard for CEOs to make commitments, he said.

"They have to take a defensive posture," Galvin said. He said the not-knowing will likely push some CEOs to take steps such as hoarding cash, postponing investments, and slowing hiring.

Galvin said that uncertainty over what decisions might emerge from the White House without warning also makes it hard for company heads to plan.

"What's making people crazy is the Mr. Miyagi approach of 'tariffs on, tariffs off, tariffs on, tariffs off,'" Galvin said, referring to the fictional character from "The Karate Kid" franchise.

Worries about the prospects for the US economy could lead some CEOs to cut workers. While 45% of leaders said in the Vistage survey they planned to add employees in the next 12 months, 14% said they plan to cut. Since the survey's inception in 2003, the only other times the share of chiefs planning cutbacks was that high was during the pandemic and the financial crisis in 2009.

The survey, which involved nearly 1,800 business leaders in the US, took place during the first two weeks of March.

The China factor

The tariffs on imports from China remain a major question mark for Haas Automation, which builds machine tools used in manufacturing. The Oxnard, California, company said Tuesday it had halted hiring because it had seen a "dramatic decrease" in demand from its US and foreign customers.

A spokesperson told BI on Thursday that Haas, which employs about 1,700 workers, plans to maintain its freeze. That's because the company still faces a tariff on components it can only source from China.

The spokesperson said that pausing hiring is better than laying people off and that Haas's situation isn't "all doom and gloom."

Typically, the company posts about a dozen openings a month because of worker turnover. The spokesperson said Haas plans to maintain the hiring freeze until the US and China can reach some agreement concerning trade.

"Our competitiveness against foreign products is going to suffer until this thing is worked out," the spokesperson said.

Breteau, the QIMA CEO, said that not having a better handle on what will happen next means that some corporate chiefs will likely hold off on some decision-making — even with the 90-day pause.

"It looks like a timeout in a game that never ends," he said.

• Erik Boquist, 27, has made a side gig out of helping older adults improve their tech skills.
• He charges $50 an hour, offering personalized guidance.
• Boquist said he enjoys the work because the older people he helps are grateful and "so sharp."

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Erik Boquist, 27, who lives in Sutton, New Hampshire, and travels the US and beyond working as a house-sitter with his girlfriend. Boquist also does video editing. His latest side gig is showing people, many of whom are older, how to level up their tech skills. Business Insider has verified his identity and that Boquist has earned money from these efforts. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.

I started thinking about training baby boomers on technology because of the simple tech tasks my mom needs help with and because I saw glimpses of my dad's workflow. Those were huge revelations.

It was everything from how they email, surf the web, and watch videos on YouTube. There might be simple things they don't know about, like changing the playback speed or using the arrows to go ahead or back five seconds.

My mother lives in a 55-plus community, and one day, after helping her, she said, "Erik, you should be doing this for everybody here."

Boom. She was right. If I'm going to help the community as much as possible, I just have to let people know I would be willing to talk with them.

My role is often vetting what they're hearing and then making money off researching it and determining if it's legit.

Other times, it might be simple things like someone wanting a box of markers to do crafts. I ask whether they've thought about Amazon and whether they have an account. If not, I might help them set it up.

I want the people I'm helping to realize that — whether they're able-bodied or not, they just need to be able to use their fingers. Dude, they're so sharp. You talk to somebody who's 80 years old — I'm not going to generalize, but I'm going to generalize — they can do what younger people can do on computers. I don't want older people's voices to be lost, the wisdom to be lost. I want them to express themselves.

I've been doing this for about six months. One of the things I'm working on now is digitizing the journals written by a woman's brother who passed away. The journals span decades.

She wants to get them into a PDF that can be shared with his friends. We're also thinking of using AI to create an audio recording of the entries. This can bring more remembrance of her brother's life and experiences because they're fascinating stories, and his voice is so interesting. Once it's digitized, she can even then play with text and make songs from the journal entries using AI.

That's why I sit down with people, usually IRL, and ask, "What do you want to do? What have you heard that interests you?"

Outside my parents, the first person I helped was my neighbor, who I always saw walking her dog. I was chatting with her, and she shared that she couldn't listen to audiobooks at night, which she had liked to do, because the battery on her phone kept dying.

I went on YouTube and used various search engines. The question became, "How do I replace a battery for an iPhone 7?" She's using an older phone, but it works for her. I'm not trying to sell her on a new one. Some of the reviews on battery-replacement kits were that the battery died 30 days after they were replaced. So, I suggested she avoid one seller, who was cheaper, and maybe go with an authorized battery replacer, who was $90. She said, "Oh, that's so great to know all this. Thank you so much. Let me pay you for this."

I told her no because it was a great lesson for me. That was the start of realizing, "Wow, that took me about 15 minutes." Then I shared all that with her in about 60 seconds, and it seemed to really impact her.

The business is essentially demystifying tech and bringing more knowledge to people.

It's been a great addition to my workflow. In recent months, I had three consistent clients. We talk about an hour at a time. It's not a 40-hour workweek by any means, but it's meaningful. So it's been four to 12 hours a week since I started, and I love it.

My fee is $50 an hour, and I haven't had the heart to bump it up. People are OK paying for it. Those who have called have been so enthusiastic. They're like, "Oh my gosh, I wish that somebody had been doing the sooner."

Every client surprises me. Someone might say something like, "I hear Bluesky is the opposite of X." Just hearing that brought me to dive deeper into that comparison. It's fascinating.

My girlfriend and I are heading to Seattle soon to house-sit for a family with a pair of beagles. We've been doing it for a couple of years now. There are coffee shops a two-minute walk from the place. I'll put up flyers there and at the grocery store, and we'll see what rolls in.

I've had sessions on FaceTime, but when I'm in person, people seem more likely to ask if I can come back the next week. Then, one of the things we work on is to go from cash or check to Venmo.

• A widening tariff fight could slow hiring across a range of industries.
• Increased trade barriers could also hurt hiring in areas that have been strong, like retail.
• White-collar hiring, which has been weak, might not get hit as much, one economist told BI.

An expanding tariff fight could push the US job market from meh to miserable.

Michelle Budnick, a documentary filmmaker in New York, worries that her search will get harder. The 47-year-old has been looking for full-time production work for over two years.

Budnick told Business Insider that the uncertainty created by steeper trade barriers — and the attendant specter of weaker consumer spending — will likely further reduce how much companies are willing to spend on production.

"It's like pouring tar on top of syrup. We're just going to drown under this," said Budnick, referring to workers like herself in creative fields.

While it's too soon to say precisely what economic contrails might become visible across the job market after President Donald Trump's tariff announcement on April 2, economists told Business Insider that uncertainty will likely push some employers to curtail hiring.

"It's kind of a frozen market," Andrew Flowers, chief economist at Appcast, told BI. "There's going to be even less hiring and maybe an increase in firing."

For months, the prospect of a trade war has sat like unexploded ordnance alongside some companies' business plans. Now that Trump is moving ahead with tariffs, including a baseline 10% levy, the impact could be profound.

"We're starting to see maybe more feelings that, 'Hey, this wasn't a negotiation tactic, and that these tariffs are likely here to stay,'" Cory Stahle, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, told BI.

Tepid hiring could spread

Flowers said that some of the sluggishness that has afflicted white-collar hiring for years could overtake other parts of the job market.

He said a few areas that had been strong, like healthcare, are likely to remain so. Yet industries that had been relative bright spots, including retail, transportation and warehousing, and some corners of manufacturing — one purported domestic beneficiary of tariffs — could get whacked, Flowers said.

US employers are already bringing on workers at the slowest pace in nearly a decade, Stahle said. On top of that, the number of job postings in the US has declined, he noted.

At the end of December, listings had risen to about 12% above their pre-COVID-19 levels, Stahle said. Then, from early January to the end of March, openings drifted downward to about 8.2% above their pre-pandemic levels.

Silver linings

Flowers said industries like finance, insurance, tech, and professional services, which he said have been experiencing a "white-collar recession" for two to three years, might not get hit as hard because they're already somewhat weak and because the impact of tariffs might be indirect.

One bright spot is that overall layoffs remain low, even with broad cuts in the offing for federal workers.

However, Flowers said, the biggest impact on workers could come from lackluster hiring.

"There will be job cuts because of these tariffs, but almost proportionally more impactful is the fact that there won't be hiring because of these tariffs," he said.

Flowers said in a worst-case scenario, where tariff retaliation spills into a tit-for-tat global trade war, layoffs would be likely.

"The steepness of the tariff rates have spooked investors and have spooked business leaders," Flowers said.

Any impact will be in addition to the job and spending cuts the White House is attempting to make in government agencies through the Department of Government Efficiency advisory group run by Elon Musk.

A White House spokesperson said in a statement to BI that tariffs are a "critical" part of the president's economic agenda.

"The administration is also slashing regulations, pushing tax cuts, and unleashing American energy to drive down energy costs — policies that will also usher in economic and job growth as they did during the first Trump presidency," the spokesperson said.

'A self-fulfilling prophecy'

Stahle said a greater risk than the hit from tariffs could be the uncertainty they create, especially if that leads businesses to pull back on hiring and spending or pushes consumers to lock away their wallets.

"If people are feeling that it's going to absolutely destroy things, and they act off that expectation, it could end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy," he said, referring to the fallout from tariffs.

That precarious atmosphere was increasingly evident Friday. The March jobs report showed greater gains in US hiring than forecast, alongside downward revisions to job growth for the start of the year.

Yet, global markets plunged for a second day, with the benchmark S&P 500 index losing more than 10% in two days.

Many investors are now looking past pre-tariff data points and focusing instead on the prospects for a business environment where global trade might be hemmed in by protectionist tendencies.

"Month-old data increasingly feels like ancient history now," Stahle said, referring to the March jobs report.

For Budnick, the filmmaker, a key concern is that tariffs could make business owners less willing to spend on the type of content she produces. Already, she's struggled. Prior to February 2023, Budnick hadn't gone without full-time work for a dozen years.

"You wonder what the future is going to hold," she said. "Where is this going to go if people cannot support their families?"

Do you have a story to share about your job hunt? Contact this reporter at [email protected].

• Federal job cuts are creating an opportunity for companies in need of skilled workers.
• While private-sector hiring for desk workers is sluggish, it could offer a narrow lifeline to some.
• The CEO of Range said the startup hopes to accelerate hiring because so many workers are available.

Fahad Hassan has seen the impact of federal job cuts through some of the people he's met.

Not long after the Department of Government Efficiency began orchestrating sweeping cuts to the federal workforce, Hassan's friends introduced him to several government workers who were seeking safer waters.

He sensed an opportunity.

Hassan, who is cofounder and CEO of Range, a digital wealth-management startup outside Washington, DC, saw the exodus of federal employees as a chance to scoop up workers with the expertise he needed.

"We're getting lucky and potentially being able to hire a bunch of folks ahead of schedule," he told Business Insider.

Some of the places where people with extensive public sector experience have traditionally landed, such as universities or nonprofits, face their own funding challenges under the DOGE doctrine.

Yet companies like Range that haven't slowed hiring amid concerns about a possible economic gut punch from a trade war could offer an important, if narrow, lifeline for current and former government workers seeking jobs.

Finding a home in the private sector won't necessarily be easy. The job market for desk workers is broadly sluggish — something some laid-off government workers are already experiencing even as some state governments try to pick up the slack.

Cuts outlined by DOGE, the advisory body led by Elon Musk, translated to more than 280,000 planned layoffs of federal workers and contractors in the past two months, according to a new tally by the staffing firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

More government layoffs followed this week, for example, at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Federal knowhow

A recent analysis by Indeed found that workers at government agencies in DOGE's crosshairs are searching for and applying for jobs at "well above" the usual level.

Ben Walker, CEO of Ditto Transcripts, sees a potential benefit from the government's retrenchment. He often seeks to hire people with federal certification to work with the criminal justice information that his company handles.

Many of Ditto's clients are law enforcement and other government agencies that work with sensitive records pertaining to everything from healthcare to criminal activity and wiretaps.

Because more people with government experience — and familiarity with the federal guidelines his company needs to adhere to — are or soon could be out of work, Walker expects it will be easier than in the past to find workers.

Walker said he's hoping to hire as many as 10 transcriptionists in the next two to three months for various contracts that he expects will come through. The company is based in Denver, but most of its 50-some employees work remotely throughout the US.

Walker said he might also use the market's surplus of qualified workers to cut a handful of low-performers.

"Why wouldn't we replace them with three or four outstanding people?" he said.

'A ton of opportunity'

Hassan said Range is looking to hire 100 people, including staffers in operations, marketing, and product management and more than 30 engineers.

Range is largely hiring at its McLean, Virginia, headquarters, though also in the New York and Seattle areas.

"We have a ton of opportunity," Hassan said. Many would-be employees exiting the government he's met are available, excited, and interested, he said.

Those with federal experience on their résumé often use that as an in with businesses that contract with the government.

Yet it's not clear how much of that work will persist, said Patrice Williams-Lindo, CEO of Career Nomads, which helps professionals navigate career changes.

She told BI that government contractors could see their workloads decrease as spending cuts in Washington, DC, ripple through the economy. That could occur if the government dumps contracts or if it says no to some of the related add-ons that tend to extend workloads — and the need for employees.

"The pie is smaller," Williams-Lindo said.

Nevertheless, she said, even a job that doesn't last as long as government jobs historically have would likely be a godsend for someone needing work.

A possible payoff

For federal workers who manage to snag a role in the private sector, the rewards could be substantial.

Hassan, who runs Range, said government workers with the necessary skills and expertise can often expect a jump in pay. He said an engineer with seven years of experience earning about $145,000 at the Department of Energy could pull in closer to $250,000 a year at Range.

Hassan said he doesn't want to take advantage of workers accustomed to government salaries by lowballing them.

"I'm going to pay them what they're worth," he said.

Hassan doesn't worry that those who have spent "their whole lives" in government aren't suited for life inside a startup. He said the right people are those who can be trained and who can pivot, including federal workers.

"They've got amazing skills and superpowers in one or two areas," Hassan said of the government workers he's spoken with. "If we need to adjust them to be in a more Google-like environment, we can do that."

Ultimately, he said, there are phenomenal people everywhere.

"A lot of them are in government," Hassan said.

Are you a government worker? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal at tparadis.70. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.