The options he says he does not have

When the man who makes aluminium window frames in Hail opened his workshop, he could do almost anything. Take an order or turn it down. Close on a slow afternoon. Try a new design on a whim. Very little depended on any single choice.

Ten years later he has eight people on the payroll, a loan on the machines, and one large customer, a building contractor, who brings in most of his work and pays later every season. He says he has no choice but to keep him.

It feels true. It is not quite true.

What he lost along the way was freedom, in the sense of choices with small consequences. What he gained is something different and heavier. He can still end the arrangement with the contractor. He can sell a machine, let the loan shrink, take fewer orders from more people. He can sit down with a partner who no longer pulls his weight and part ways. None of it is easy. All of it would hurt for a while, and some of it would hurt people he cares about.

But difficult choices are still choices. A business that has grown has more power to change things, not less. It just has to pay for each change, and it has to own what follows.

That is exactly why it is so tempting to believe the options are not there. If there is nothing to decide, there is nothing to be responsible for. The late payments become weather, something that happens to him.

The most comfortable decision available to anyone with leverage is to pretend they have no hard decisions to make.

Most of the time, they do.