On December 1, 2016, the salary threshold forovertime pay is set to nearly double from $23,660 to $47,476,by way of the Fair Labor Standards Act. For business owners, thismeans salaried employees earning less than $47,476 will now need tobe paid overtime for any time worked over 40 hours in a given week.This is no small change, and small business owners in particularare poised to be hit hard by these new regulations.

The regulations bring with them positive outcomes for thesegment of workers who might have been working 70 hour workweeks ata minimum wage salary, with no account ofovertime pay. However, for small business owners facing such amarked change in how they pay their employees, it has implicationsfor everything from company culture to the company’s bottom line —and in the end, how many people a company can employ while stillmaking ends meet.

For many business owners, the change already seems unmanageable,and has caused a certain level of grief — from wondering how tomaintain the standards of pay and benefits that they’ve establishedover the years to simply negotiating the details of a complicatednew regulation.