Capacity planning

Capacity planning is counting the hours you actually have against the hours you already promised, week by week, before you answer a new enquiry. The unit is not the calendar month, it is the week: a project that fits comfortably in a quarter can still be undeliverable because three clients all need you in the same fortnight.

The arithmetic that makes it real: start from billable hours, not working hours. A 40-hour week yields something like 25 to 28 billable hours once sales, admin, invoicing, and context-switching take their cut, and that ratio is your utilization rate. Subtract committed project hours and retainer blocks (a retainer is reserved capacity whether or not the client uses it), then hold back a contingency buffer of 15 to 20 percent for revisions and the things that always go wrong. What is left is what you can honestly sell.

The gotcha is that client-supplied dependencies do not free up capacity. When a project stalls waiting on their copy or approvals, the hours look available, so you sell them, and then all the stalled work unstalls at once. Plan against committed work, not active work. Capacity planning is also what converts 'no' into money: when the calendar says the next opening is in six weeks, you get a rush fee, a waitlist, or a price rise instead of a burnt weekend.