Blog
What we’re learning inside real hours-based businesses; utilization, margin, capacity, and the systems that hold it all together.
 Imagine you run a corner store. Hundreds of people come through every day. They stop for milk, bread, some cheese, maybe a drink, some chips, a few snacks.
You have a few employees on shift. Some ar...
Week 4 of 4: How Accurate Data Transforms Your Market Position
Here's what happens when you get the math right.
Your delivery leads stop padding estimates for safety. Your sales team stops losing co...
Week 3 of 4: Understanding How to Evaluate the Use of Your Non-Billable Time
Your weekly leadership meeting costs $4,800. Over a year, that's $240,000 in time that could be spent on client work, busi...
Week 2 of 4: Understanding What Time Is Actually Available for Billable Work
If you're making capacity plans or resource decisions based on "we have 20 people working 40 hours each," you're working o...
Week 1 of 4: Understanding What Utilization Actually Means
If you're working 50-hour weeks while margins shrink and your team burns out, the problem isn't effort. It's math. And it's been broken from...
There was this moment, one that changed how we looked at utilization forever.
We were expected to hit 72% utilization. Every month. No excuses. But we couldn’t hit it. We were always below it. And le...
When we first start working with a team, one of the very first things we look at before the numbers, before the org charts, before the fancy systems is communication.
Now, people say they “communicat...
Something we stopped doing and honestly, something we don’t understand how others still tolerate is staying quiet when things aren’t working.
And we’re not just talking about the obvious stuff. We’re...
We had a project. It wasn’t going well.
The contract was signed. The team was assigned. The client was onboarded. But something was off, right from the start. You could feel it in every meeting. The ...
I’ve seen it so many times. I walk a team through their data, their real data, all in one place and there’s a pause.
Not a technical pause. Not an “I need to digest this” pause.
A human one.
It’s l...
Where I disagree with most people in operations, especially in delivery and resourcing, comes down to one thing: data.
Most people treat data like it’s an afterthought. Something you review weekly. O...
My goal was to be a strong PM.
Communicate clearly. Hit deadlines. Keep things moving.
And for a long time, I thought I was doing everything right.
In theory, I was.
But once I stepped into leadersh...
This was one of those changes that seemed small but ended up transforming how we planned and operated.
We added live, per-person daily availability to our system. That’s it. It doesn’t sound revoluti...
For a long time, we followed the classic playbook: only leadership gets access to live data.
Why?
Because there was this fear.
Fear that if people saw how much their teammates were working or not w...
There was a time when we protected our way of doing things. We thought we had a unique system, something proprietary that only we understood.
Then we realized: there’s no secret.
Operations isn’t ro...
“We were about to hire two people… until we saw the forecast.”
That one spreadsheet saved us tens of thousands of dollars and probably saved two team members from burnout.
The crazy part? Most agenc...
We thought we had it figured out.
We rolled out a new resourcing system using our project management tool. It was meant to be the source of truth: hours, tasks, timelines, dependencies, level of effo...
We were trying to staff a big project.
One of those major accounts, great brand, great revenue potential, and likely a long-term client if we got it right. But it wasn’t simple. This wasn’t just a sp...
We Thought the Problem Was Visibility. It Wasn’t.
There’s a moment that still sticks with me. We had a team that was struggling with forecasting, resource planning, and team utilization and everyone ...
If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s this: a healthy delivery system doesn’t start with tech, software, or methodology. It starts with something far simpler: a plan.
Not a 49-slide deck. Not a te...