Have you ever used a Capacity Planner before to work out what capacity you need or the number of staff you need in your firm? In our experience, developing and working to capacity planning is not something that is done enough in practice.
We never allow any of the firms I’m working with to hire anyone until I have completed a Capacity Planner. Because it’s not a case of just hiring more “bodies to throw at the problem”. This never works.
It’s about getting the right MIX of skills and by working in a team with their complementary skills, will you get leverage and scale. Namely, 1 plus 1 gives 5.
If you do not get the right mix of skills in your team working together in a complementary fashion, it becomes extremely clunky and inefficient and you will lose lots of productivity.
The Capacity Planner will determine whether you are under or over capacity. You should run at 15% overcapacity and the best place to increase capacity is via offshore staffing or hiring someone from the Philippines or India for your grinders because it’s extremely cost-effective.
But if you don’t complete the Capacity Planner, then the majority of what you’ll be doing will remain as guesswork. You should be more scientific than just guessing.
This is what we call building an Ideal Team structure (narrow & Deep) with the right mix of people. We have extensively talked about the process of building an ideal team structure in our Wize program.