Why you should treat your employees like inventory

Have you ever had that suffocating feeling that the more your business grows, the further behind you fall?

Or maybe you’ve been burnt out one too many times, and you’re afraid to press on the gas pedal for fear that everything will fall apart if you’re not careful.

I’ve been hearing this kind of thing a lot from people lately. Business is booming, or they see opportunity ahead, and yet they find themselves unsure of how to manage it all.

Here’s some things people have told me:

• "The business is growing, but the more we sell, the further behind we get. We’re constantly missing client deadlines."

• "I know I need to hire, but I'm afraid of pulling the trigger because I'm just not sure how much I’ll be able to fill their plate."

• "There's this constant gap between where we think our projects should be, and where we actually are. I wish we had more predictability so we could understand everything that's going on."

I don’t need to tell you, growing a business is hard. But it’s even harder when you’re the kind of person who wants to be in control of your business, and it feels like that control is slipping away.

It’s not unusual for owners to be intimately involved in the day to day operations of their business. They like to know everything that’s happening and where things stand. They might even be rolling up their sleeves and doing the actual work.

And it’s all manageable… until it isn’t any more.

Here’s the truth. And deep down, you already know it.

If you want to scale your business, you need to scale how you manage it.

That’s why, if you're a growing services business, you need to treat your employees like better than inventory.

That's right, inventory management isn't just for businesses that sell stuff. It's also for businesses whose product is people.

In fact, inventory management is even MORE important for services business than businesses that sell goods.

Here's why.

• If you oversell a good, the worst case scenario is that you have an unhappy customer that didn't get their thing.

• When you oversell a PERSON, you have an unhappy customer AND an unhappy and burnt out employee.

• If you undersell a good, then the worst case scenario is that your excess stock sits on a shelf a little longer.

• If you undersell a PERSON, you have to pay for every hour that person "sits on the shelf" AND that employee feels underutilized, undervalued, and unappreciated.

Don’t wait until these problems happen before you do something about it. Waiting until your pipeline is full before making a staffing decision is like waiting to buy lemons until you’ve sold your lemonade. And people are harder to come by than lemons.

So whatever you want to call it - capacity planning, resource management, allocation, or utilization - if you want to scale your team, you need to scale your management system.

I’ve been working on some really fun projects that have helped my clients literally see into the future so that they can be more proactive with their staffing and set up projects for success.

If these are problems you’re facing, or if you want to have some fun and see what this looks like in practice, just reach out and let me know!