Written by Jessica Murray

Over the past year, I’ve worked directly with several service-based businesses and spoken to dozens of others.

One of the topics that often comes up, especially with lean and fast-growing teams, is capacity planning. It's something I also considered extensively when launching Empower, knowing we would offer various services requiring different levels of effort at each engagement phase.

When things are moving quickly, it’s easy to get pulled into “yessing” opportunities before assessing whether your team has sufficient bandwidth. While this might be OK the first or second time it happens, if this becomes a habit, you’ll quickly find yourself overwhelmed, burned out and dealing with declining team morale.

This was where one of our partners was last year when she first came to us. A highly experienced financial services professional, she had recently established her independent firm and was in a position where she had more work than hours in the day, was burning out and needed forward visibility to more proactively know when she should say “yes” and when she needed to say “no.”

So, here’s how we tackled it.

We:

Dug into the details of all her work in flight.
Broke down the components of typical projects.
Allocated time to each component.
Established the ideal number of weekly billable hours
Plotted her current projects on a timeline.
Assessed her capacity through 2024 at that point in time.
Aligned on how she should approach new incoming work.
And, finally, breathed a sigh of relief.

This exercise gave our partner peace of mind and the confidence to move forward. This was just one thing we worked on with her, but I really knew our work had an impact when she wrote the following at the end of our engagement:

Retaining Empower has been a great investment, assisting me to establish a strong operational foundation that I would not have been able to do independently.

Since I hear the capacity planning challenge repeatedly, here are five quick tips if you’re in a similar situation, with a strong desire to move from reactive to proactive.

Five Steps to Capacity Clarity

Step 1: Inventory your current workload

List all tasks, clearly distinguishing between client/project work and internal tasks like admin, marketing and business development.

If you have a team, ask each person to do the same. It’s important to emphasize this isn’t a micro-management exercise, but rather a way to empower them and ensure you’re not consistently over-extending resources.

Step 2: Define what “good” looks like

What does the healthy ideal state look like for you and the members of your team? Define how many hours per week should be spent on client/project work and the allocation for other tasks. This will give you a baseline to work toward and is foundational to effective workload management.

Step 3: Deconstruct the work

Break projects into stages, assign responsible team members, and estimate time and duration for each stage. For example, if Joan typically handles Discovery, determine how many hours she spends and over what timeframe.

Step 4: Plot projects on a weekly timeline

Represent the current state of work across your business on a clear weekly timeline, capturing all active projects and their components. This also assists with accurately managing overall billable hours.

Step 5: Make a plan to track and manage capacity

Whether it’s a spreadsheet or investing in technology that can help streamline capacity management, determine the process and templates required to maintain an active capacity plan going forward. This will boost your operational efficiency and align your team.

Need help?

If managing capacity and preventing burnout feels overwhelming right now, let's connect. Empower offers customized support to help you design clarity and confidence into your workflow.

CAPACITY CLARITY: HOW TO MOVE YOUR BUSINESS FROM REACTIVE TO PROACTIVE