600 Clients on a Team of 16 | David Salerno on Why He Will Not Hire to Fix a Problem

The Operating System Show · Sep 16, 2026 · 29m

David Salerno built Solpak into one of Canada's most recognized packaging companies. Six hundred food sector clients across the country, on a team of sixteen people. He did not get there by being efficient after the fact. He decided early that headcount was a vanity metric and ran the business that way for twenty years. Zapier for a decade, now Claude. The current policy at Solpak is that nobody gets hired unless the leadership team can make a business case for the hire over automating the work. The moment it became visible to him was a banker sitting across from him for two hours. Numbers…