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Manage Your Clients and Don’t Let Them Manage You

Dealing with Overcapacity issues

Is your staff screaming for work? The most successful business owners work on the Balance Sheet (preventative activities) and not just on P&L activities (putting out fires or reactive activities).

Fixing the problem is the best way to go and not treating the symptoms. Here are some steps that you can take to fix your overcapacity issue in the long term.

  1. Use the capacity planner to work out exactly what staff levels you need especially around resource mix on an annual basis based on your turnover.
  2. Schedule your workload across the whole year so it does not all come in at once.

However, for the short term ask clients to come in to do a set of their interim accounts and do some tax planning. Do budgets for them and cash flow forecasts.

Have planning sessions and train the staff on how to do this. Take the opportunity to do all the Quad B activities (important but not urgent) things such as training, tidy up the database, improve filing systems, sales training, complete job descriptions, get them to take their annual leave and any other leave.

Get the Senior Client Managers to start planning out the workload for FY2022 now. Work out each month’s capacity based on annual leave of staff then identify which clients should bring their work in which month from July 2021 to June 2022 based on staff capacity for each month.

You can then start sending letters out to clients advising them which months you would like them to bring their work in. As months get closer, follow up with email/phone calls so you are proactive and not reactive.

Manage your clients and don’t let them manage you (i.e.: drop their work in whenever they want to) If you let them manage you, they will drag you into their nightmare since most clients are disorganized and reactive.

You will remove dead spots in your workflow schedule by managing them. As a side benefit, you will make more money and staff will be less stressed and when compared to your competitors, you turn out to be much more professional. Most clients want you to manage them so don’t be afraid to lead. Most of them are waiting for you to tell them what to do.

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