Hiring someone is hard if you don't have the money to pay them, and competent people don't tend to come cheap. That's the position a LOT of small businesses are probably in. Working for equity generally only happens if there's a a chance of an IPO or sellout in the not too distant future. So you gotta pay them, sometimes at the cost of your own income, since you (the owner) are usually the only one the value of whose paycheck is negotiable on a week by week basis.

It's an extremely common problem that small businesses reach a dead man's curve point where there's too much work for the original one or two people who start it, but not enough to go up to the next step and start hiring people to take the load off.

The sad fact is that the vast majority of small businesses fail, generally somewhere in the range of 9 out of 10. It's not going to be hugely helpful to someone barely making enough money to pay the rent or car payment to say, well just hire some people.

Not saying that's the case here, but clearly it's an extremely common scenario. Particularly if you are in a service industry, it's easy to forget that all those other folks out there with product oriented small businesses are consuming money, not making it, for a considerable period of time.