<i>Sometimes the best business decision is not the most convenient one for the employees - life is full of tradeoffs.</i><p>That&#x27;s very true, and sometimes the best business decision is one that favours staff retention over short term profit. Losing the experience and expertise of someone who&#x27;s been in the company a while just because you can&#x27;t manage your team well enough to get people trained to cover one another&#x27;s vacation time is going to get expensive when people burn out and quit, not to mention the effect it&#x27;ll have on staff morale and your business&#x27;s reputation as a bad place to work (which has a knock-on effect on sales).<p>You&#x27;re entirely right that a small business can&#x27;t afford to have complete redundancy for every staff position - the appropriate strategy is to put well documented processes in place, with good handover management and proper knowledge sharing. Discouraging people from taking vacation time to the point where you&#x27;d only hire in countries where you can give your staff zero paid vacation days is not.