For years, growth had a relatively simple formula: more — at all costs.
More people, more roles, more teams, more motion, more! Companies scaled by addition with new hires and departments with relative ease.
But somewhere between this hypergrowth and the reality we’re seeing now, the math stopped working. “More” started costing far too much and delivering far too little (or too slowly) in return.
Now, as leaders stare at their 2026 plans, they’re realizing something a bit uncomfortable…
WSJ recently claimed Corporate America is ending its “firing freeze,” taking a swift and severe magnifying glass to headcount. After years of hoarding top talent, major companies are now cutting deeply (from Amazon’s 14,000 roles to UPS’ 48,000 and Meta’s 600), with countless others of all sizes and stages quietly following suit in just the past few weeks alone.
TLDR: Headcount, once a proxy for growth and progress -> now a liability.
Target’s incoming CEO, Michael Fiddelke, put it bluntly in a recent employee memo when announcing 1,800 corporate layoffs: “Too many layers and overlapping work have slowed decisions, making it harder to bring ideas to life.”
That phrasing matters. The issue is cost, yes, but it’s also decision velocity. The structure itself has become the bottleneck.
We’ve been taught to treat headcount like arithmetic. Add when times are good, subtract when they’re not.
But in today’s world, headcount resembles an org design problem more than anything. And design is all about intent: how people, skills, tech, and teams interlock to create velocity. Consider what that could look like in practice:
These shifts highlight that the problem isn’t necessarily how many people you have, but how those people are strategically designed to work together.
And yet, many companies facing the headcount challenge might be asking, “So… how many do we cut?”
But what if that question itself is flawed? What if we didn’t have to go to such extremes, so fast? While some cuts may be justified, are we really ready to live in a labor market where tens of thousands of cuts in one afternoon is the norm?
What if instead, we asked, “How can the team we have now move faster, smarter, and together?”
More companies are asking this question, giving rise to a new movement: the fall of the silo, and the rise of consolidation.
For decades—and still, in many organizations—companies were built around functional silos: marketing sits here, sales over there, customer success somewhere in between. Each with its own metrics, tech stack, and agenda.
That org design made sense when markets were predictable and scale was linear. But today? Those walls slow growth. Let’s take the classic misalignment between sales and marketing as an example: duplicated outreach, misaligned incentives, handoffs that lose momentum.
That internal friction and inefficiency may cost more than headcount itself.
So what’s the alternative? Bringing it all under one roof.
Consolidating teams like marketing, sales, customer success/support, and revenue operations into one coherent structure. One goal. One motion. One team.
When Amanda Malko went from 3x Chief Marketing Officer to Chief Revenue Officer at Thinkific, she redefined how growth happens. In her new role, Malko oversees several (previously, disparate) functions under one unified structure:
This consolidation eliminated silos and created a single, shared vision for revenue generation.
“There’s a macro trend where marketing and sales have radically changed in the last five years,” Malko explains. “Roles, scope, and goals are starting to converge. Especially for growth-stage or product-led companies, I think you’ll see even more of this convergence.”
Fewer silos = a single narrative for revenue growth. In an era of constrained headcount, this is how you get more out of what you already have.
Malko is quick to point out that consolidation isn’t one-size-fits-all. “There’s no absolute right or wrong,” she notes. “It’s a puzzle—who you have, what you’re trying to accomplish.”
If you’re a founder, investor, CEO, or GTM leader reading this, here are three practical questions to help assess:
Every CEO and board knows the risk of over-hiring. Fewer recognize the risk of structural inertia.
Waiting for “the next hiring cycle” assumes the world will look the same when it arrives. It won’t.
Stop thinking of headcount as something you either add or subtract. Start thinking of it as something you design.
If you’re ready to rethink your org design or identify the talent that can accelerate your next phase of growth, get in touch with us.