If you are running at 90% every week you have not got a business, you have got a job you cannot walk away from. There is no slack in it anywhere. That is the thing worth fixing, not your diary.
Being booked out sounds like the finish line. Live in it for 2 years and it stops feeling like one.
90 to 100%, every week, is not a business running well. It is a business with no room to breathe, and there is nowhere for it to go except through you.
4 months of work booked in is a backlog. It is a run of jobs you happened to win, and it clears.
The week it does, you are back to ringing round and hoping, exactly where you were 2 years ago, except now you have got used to being busy and your overheads have caught up.
It is not more hours. You have not got any. It is a bigger business doing the same amount of work.
Take somebody on so the business can handle 20% more, and the same workload is not filling 90% of it any more. It is filling 75% of something bigger. 75% is where you can breathe. It is where you turn the bad job down, where you put the prices up, where you go away for a week and your phone stays in the drawer.
Hiring off a backlog is a gamble. 4 months booked is not 4 months guaranteed, and if you take somebody on against it you find out in month 3. Work landing at a rate you can count on turns that into a sum you can actually do beforehand.
If you are full, more enquiries are worth nothing to you. So that is not where we would begin.
| Prices go up firstIf you are turning work away, you are too cheap. This costs nothing to test and it is the fastest money in the business | 1 |
| Then we go after bigger jobs, not more of themBetter work in the same diary. A bigger job is not always the same hours, so we look at what is left per week rather than per job | 2 |
| The better work replaces the cheap workSame hours, more left at the end of them. That margin is what pays for a second pair of hands | 3 |
| You take somebody onAgainst work you can predict, not a backlog you are hoping holds | 4 |
| Now there is room in the weekAnd we fill it deliberately, with the sort of jobs you actually want | 5 |
If the diary's full of work you're happy with and you don't want to grow your business, don't do this. That is a completely fair answer and I would not try to talk you out of it. I would rather say so on the call than have you find out 3 months down the line.
No pitch. I'll ask what a job's worth to you once everything's paid, and whether you could handle more of them. If it's not a fit I'll say so and you've lost ten minutes.
Pick a time that suits you below. You'll get a reminder the day before, and it'll be me ringing, not a call centre.
