Count hours, by skill
Five people is not capacity. Five people, of whom two hold the certification your highest-margin service requires, is capacity — and the constraint is those two, not the five.
Build the number per skill: who can perform this work type, how many usable hours each has, and therefore how many jobs of that type you can deliver in a week. Every business discovers a bottleneck skill it had been treating as abundant.
Usable hours, not paid hours
- Travel between jobs, which grows non-linearly as territory widens.
- Setup, teardown, loading and yard time.
- Leave, sickness, training and the days people are simply unavailable.
- Rework and callbacks — capacity spent on revenue you already recognised.
Reading the gap
Put required hours next to sellable hours, week by week, four to eight weeks out. Persistent shortfall is a hiring signal. Spiky shortfall is a subcontracting signal. Persistent surplus is a sales problem being described as an operations problem.
The reason to do this on a forward horizon rather than a trailing report is that hiring takes weeks and onboarding takes more. By the time a backlog is painful, the decision needed to be made a month ago.
Hire, subcontract or decline
Hiring adds fixed cost and takes time, and it is the right answer for demand you can see repeating. Subcontracting is faster, more expensive per hour, and correct for peaks and for skills you do not want to carry year-round.
The third option is the one nobody lists: sell less, or sell differently. Taking work you cannot staff is how businesses damage their reputation while growing their revenue.