Your business has capacity restrictions – actual physical ones.
As a trade business, work gets done by real people out there on properties or building sites – so, since there’s only so much a person can do in a day, there’s only so much work your business can do with the tradespeople you have.
You can hire more people, of course, and that’s how you grow but hiring can take time (and at the moment, decent people are hard to find – not impossible, just hard). I hear people frustrated that there’s work but they can’t find the people to do it.
So, we have systems to help you find good people and hire well – you should ask about them – and you can use temporary solutions so you can take on more work while you wait for new people to join your team.
You can use subcontractors – other trades businesses who are quiet (your competitors).
You can subcontract more of the work if you normally do lots in-house.
You can ask your guys to work some overtime for a bit or you can adjust your customer’s expectations a bit.
So you have some ability to grow capacity while you hire.
But your real-life tradespeople aren’t the only places you need to grow capacity.
You need to do more marketing so there are more leads and more sales to convert those leads into jobs.
You can hire or appoint marketing agencies, of course, but probably the best person to drive marketing and sales is YOU.
This means you need to increase your capacity – you’re probably a bottleneck, a capacity constraint.
And this also means reducing the time you spend on admin.
So let’s focus on increasing capacity in your admin.
You can hire an admin person to do admin and financial work.
You can get help from an accountant or a bookkeeper.
You can hire virtual assistants – qualified and intelligent people who live in countries like the Philippines where it’s cheaper to live and wages are lower.
You can hire someone directly or you can use agencies to hire, support, train, and manage someone for you. It costs more but it takes work off you.
So you have choices and you should make them – don’t limit yourself to just hiring a whole person.
Ask for our worksheet on resourcing your back office.