The dangerous stage isn't the start. It's the middle, where you're too big to do it alone and too small to afford help.

It is a Thursday afternoon and you are doing a job you meant to hire for months ago. The revenue to justify the hire is still a quarter or two away, and customers expect more than they did last year. You tell yourself the stretch is temporary.

A report out of Syracuse University puts numbers on that exact stretch, though not in the industry you probably work in. "A Hard Reality: Independent Local Journalism in the United States," by Merrill Brown and Jacob Spudich of the university's Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship, surveys the people who run small independent local news outlets. I read the full report and its methodology note, not just the coverage of it. The report gives its date only as spring 2026, so that is all I will say about timing.

Here is the method, plainly. In April 2026 the institute invited 277 operators to take an online survey, drawn from directories and member lists. 112 responded, from 37 states and Washington, D.C., a response rate of 40.4 percent. This is a survey, not an experiment: it tells you what operators said about their own situations, at one point in time. It cannot tell you what causes what. The authors also disclose that they used AI tools, Claude among them, to help identify organizations, refine questions and run a first pass of the analysis, and they say they checked the output against the raw data. The institute that ran the survey also published it; I did not find an outside funder named.

The findings. Burnout and sustainability together were the most frequently selected challenge: 55.7 percent of respondents named it. That is one combined answer option, so it is not a clinical burnout measure, and it is not a count of people who are burned out. It was not evenly spread. It peaked at 77.3 percent among operators with 100 to 500 paying subscribers. Among operators who publish multiple times a day, 61 percent reported it, the highest of any publishing-frequency group. The report also says 89.2 percent have some form of paid or volunteer help, and that 8.3 percent of the 100-to-500 group still work entirely alone. The report does not say how many respondents sit in that group, so I would not lean hard on the 77.3 percent as a precise figure.

The authors read the pattern this way:

But a business that survives because its founder works unsustainable hours is not yet a sustainable business.

Merrill Brown and Jacob Spudich, "A Hard Reality," Syracuse University IDJC, full report

They also describe what they call a dangerous middle: too successful to stay hobby-sized, not yet successful enough to be adequately staffed, because the revenue to hire the next person lags behind expectations. That framing is theirs; the survey asked what operators faced, not why the curve bends.

The report is candid about its limits, and that caution is theirs, stated in the report: the sample covers only organizations that still exist, it did not systematically capture founders who launched and shut down, and it underrepresents parts of the Deep South, Great Plains and Mountain West. The authors say it almost certainly presents a more encouraging picture than the field as a whole. Add what I would say myself: respondents also chose whether to take part, many of these founders learned to run a business on the job, and a company like yours is a different animal.

Here is why this lands differently for the person at the top than for anyone else in the building. Your managers can feel the strain of the middle stage, but they can't see it as a pattern, because they don't see the payroll arithmetic that creates it. You do. You are also the person whose hours quietly fill the gap, and the business's results can look healthy precisely because of it.

The part the research doesn't say, but that I'll say plainly: the stage that worries me is not the one with a crisis in it. It is the one where the numbers are good enough to explain away the load. The report's authors call survival and sustainability different things. In a company with employees, I would add that a plan that only works while one person absorbs the overflow has no margin when that person is sick, distracted, or deciding whether to keep going. That is my inference from their finding, not something the survey tested in companies like yours.

One thing to do this week: list every task you personally did in the last thirty days that you would not want to be the permanent owner of. Next to each, write what it would cost to move it, in dollars per month. Then compare that total to the revenue you would need to cover it. If the gap is smaller than you assumed, you have been paying for it in hours instead.

How you carry that middle is a wiring question as much as an arithmetic one. The Leadership Profile maps which one you are.