Sorry about the terrible title. But today I want to talk about sacking people at Christmas time.

I raise this because I spent Monday night having a drink with a entrepreneur friend, who was agonising over whether she should wait until the new year to fire someone. Just to be clear, the argument wasn't about whether this person needed firing - her mind was made up on that score. The only question was whether she should get it out of the way now, or wait until January.

I sympathised to some extent, because it’s easy to think of convincing reasons not to do it. I've never been fired a week before Christmas, but I can't imagine it's very nice (equally I've never fallen off a cliff into a bed of barbed wire, but I'm pretty confident that's no fun either). In fact, I think it's fairly safe to assume that it would probably ruin that person's Christmas to a large extent. So it's a horrible thing to have to tell someone.

Then there’s the impact on the rest of your staff. Not only does it put a bit of a downer on morale in what is generally a pretty cheerful month, it also makes people look at you in a new light. It takes a certain type of person to sack someone just before Christmas, and some of your staff might not have realised you were the type. Equally, since lots of people will be away over Christmas, talking to their families about their jobs and reflecting on their place in the world after one too many Christmas sherries, there's a chance that it might take on an exaggerated significance. If nothing else, it's much harder for you to manage the fall-out than it would be ordinarily, simply because people aren’t around.

The problem is that as far as your business is concerned – and that has to be your key priority – the decision is fairly cut and dried. If you accept that nothing much gets done in the second half of December anyway, you don’t want to be paying someone you don’t even want to do nothing, and then pay them to do nothing again in January. Bite the bullet now, and those two weeks become part of their notice period. It sounds harsh, but unless you’re running a charity, you can’t afford to keep people on the payroll who aren’t delivering, particularly at the moment. And if you're serious about being an entrepreneur and building a great company, you have to be able to make horrible decisions like that, however much you may hate the idea.

Besides, I’m not even convinced that waiting until January is the humanitarian thing to do. Chances are the person concerned has an inkling of what’s coming (at least they should be, if your performance management systems are any good), so they’ll probably be fretting about it anyway. At least by getting it over with now, they can have Christmas off to lick their wounds, convince themselves it's all for the best, and focus on getting a new job in the new year. As for the impact on everyone else, it’s all about positioning: if you can persuade people that you’re doing this in the best interests of the business, which is ultimately in their best interests because it protects their jobs, then people aren't really going to hold it against you. And a bit of shock and awe every now and then probably doesn't hurt, anyway.

Still, easy for me to say. Rather her than me, was my overriding thought on the tube home.