When are you at Capacity? | How to (Visually) Know When to Onboard or Schedule Your Next Client

Hello. Testing, 1, 2, 3. Here we are. Hello. I am sorry I'm a little bit late today. My house is without air conditioning right now. So I'm thinking that just the heat is making my brain foggy. But nonetheless I am here with a live, talking again about workflows and how you can use them in your business. How documenting the big picture workflows in your business, turning those into documentation and overall putting that into a system like ClickUp can help you feel a little bit more sane. If you have air conditioning. If you don't have air conditioning, I guess you're, you're kind of screwed either way. So what I want to talk about today is actually the idea of capacity and how that affects process mapping or how those two things connect. And I'm hoping this will be a valuable, hoping this will be a valuable video even though it's going to be a little bit different for every single person. But this is a topic I've seen come up quite a bit in the group lately and it's something I've been thinking about a lot with my own services that I want to bring it up here as the group. So here we are, we have a very basic process map. We have an intake form that might be on the website. We have a, maybe a consult call of some kind. We have a prep assignment that we might send. I guess actually that would be. If we're not doing it automatically, you'd have to send that prep assignment manually. They have the prep assignment, you'd receive it, receive the prep and then you'd have your call. Let's imagine this is like a one time strategy session kind of service session. This could be a process map for an actual service. This could be your service, that is your, I don't know, intensives are all the rage. Now let's just say this is your intensive offer. The way you offer a one off consulting on whatever it is you do, web design, brand book coaching, whatever it is, if you're having it in an intensive format, this might be what your day looks like. And I think when we're talking about process mapping a lot, and I'm guilty of it here as well, we tend to focus on isolation. In isolation of this is your process, this is what you're selling, this is how your service works. When we bundle this all up into a nice little box, yes, this is how your service works. But I don't know about you, but there is very rare, there's never been the case where I have sold a service that is only for One person at a time. I mean, my services are all individual. However, you're generally juggling several clients at one time. So rather than thinking about one nice little package that that's just what you have to do to fulfill that service. Really what it ends up looking like is you have intake number one, then you have someone else intaking here, and then you've got that whole process of things stacking up and then over here. Rather than making it one package that you need to fulfill from start to finish, you've got people jumping into your service at different moments in time. You might have two clients one week who start the intake. Well, if two clients are starting your intake process in week one, what does that mean for week two and week three and week four? When are you able to take on more clients? If all we have mapped right now is the actual process and what's involved in that. So I'm kind of going to step away from the kind of the true form of process mapping and talk about how I capacity plan around services. Normally I do this on an Excel spreadsheet. You know me, it's actually a Google sheet. But I'm going to do it on pen and paper today to try to help us visualize our capacity. So the way I do that, and I'm just going to select all this, we'll see if the selection tool works for me. Maybe. Is it going to let me rotate it? No. Okay, nevermind. We're just going to do it by hand. The way I like to do this is to actually figure out how much time is involved with for you at each step of your process. Again, if you're joining us a little bit late here, what I'm talking about is how you can connect your process map the service blueprint, the way you deliver your stuff, and connect that to your capacity, your availability, whether it's yourself or yourself and your team. Because there's only so many hours in a day and most likely you are dealing with not just one client in this service. You are dealing with a whole bunch and they're all coming in at different times and very rare that you'll have them all start at the first of the month. So we need to figure out how can you stagger these without killing yourself by going over capacity or over committing yourself. So here's how I like to approach it. For each step of this process, let's figure out how much time it takes me or my team, any, any labor that I'm paying for, how long it takes me to do that. So the Intake form for me is zero hours. The consult call. Let's say yours is 20 minutes. Takes time to prep all that. Let's say it's one hour because you need to prep for it, you need to recap after it, you need to keep your notes up to date, all that stuff. Did I lose my pen? There it is, all at once, one hour. Sending the prep assignment. Let's assume you don't have this automated and if you don't, maybe you should. But let's just assume it's not automated and it takes you 20 minutes. I'm actually going to make my math easier. Let's just say it's 15 minutes. They actually do the assignment, which takes no time from you unless you have any questions that you need to answer. But let's just assume there's no questions. So it's zero minutes. And then the actual session, which perhaps this is the end of your service. Maybe this takes you three hours. Maybe it's a two hour session. Half hour, wind down, wind up. Maybe you don't do too much prep. Let's just say it's three hours. Actually, I'm just gonna make myself even easier here. And let's just make that 30 minutes. So we are at four and a half hours for this overall process. And that sounds like no big deal because this obviously takes some time. But now I want to map this out on a calendar of how many days is between each of these steps on average. In an ideal world, how quickly does this process go? What's the throughput that'll help us figure out our pacing and how many of these we can get through in a month to help us determine pricing. But also when can we start? The second one or the third one or the fifth one or when one kicks off. So I like to actually flip my orientation at this point and go from this way horizontal to vertical. You'll see why in a moment. So we're going to reorient ourselves here and we're going to map out kind of how this process looks. So we've got intake. Let's just say day one, day one. How do I want to do this? Actually, let's go. We're going to do a little bit of a matrix. Week one, week two. This whole process would probably take about two weeks, but let's say week three will map a little bit further out just to let us do the whole thing. And again, if you're just joining us talking about capacity planning and I'm doing it by pen and paper, which is a little Unusual for me versus normally a spreadsheet, but I think it will help us illustrate this in a more clear way. We'll see. See how good my handwriting is? So we've got our weeks. Each of these steps takes the amount of time I said. So if we were to stagger these about a week, and let's just give each one a color, we will put it on the calendar to see how long it takes us to get through this process for one client in a perfect world or in a normal world. So week one we'd probably have our intake, which doesn't take any time for us. We'd have our consult call probably all in the same week. If your clients are generally booking right away, if your process takes three a while to get them in, then maybe it would be in week two that they have their consult. But let's just say this is one hour. And I'm going to use a block to symbolize an hour here. So this is our consult. Maybe you send them the prep assignment that week. So that's a half hour. And I'm drawing symbols here. Stay with me. We've got send prep, send prep. You send them the prep. Maybe on average it takes them about a week to get you that prep work back. And so then you know that you're going to receive the prep and be able to have the session maybe the following week. So that's a three hour block of time. And we're just going to block this off here. So we've got three hours and this is just for one client to have the actual session again. This is a perfect world. Maybe your spacing is different, but what we can start doing, and I like to call this Tetris scheduling or capacity planning. Tetris is what I'm able to pull from this, is the overall shape of this service on a calendar. Imagine this was on a grid here. Our shape would look something like this, this, this, this, this. Generally I wouldn't do halves, but you get the idea. This is kind of the shape of our service. It's got three down, three hours in the second week, one and a half in the first week. That gives us the shape of the service. Now, if you ever played Tetris before, you know how the game works. These blocks are coming down and they're in certain shapes because they're designed that way. And your job as the player of the game is to put the shapes together in a way that allows you to fit the most in the most effectively, not max out your space. If we think about Our service, each service we offer has a set process because it's productized, or at least somewhat productized in terms of how you fulfill it, has more or less a set timeline because you know how long it generally takes. We can start treating these like Tetris blocks and helping us visualize how much time and kind of the spacing we need for each service. So let's just say I work. Let's just do a low example to make it easier for my math here. Let's say I work five hours a week on this service in my entire team. Like, that's all the hours that my team has for fulfillment in this service. So I'm going to draw these out here. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. You can see I'm already making it look like a spreadsheet. I tried to, I tried to be creative guys, but this is really a spreadsheet activity. I hope you're following with me here. But it does really come together. This service that we've got. Service one, service one. This is the shape it has. If I was on my spreadsheet or if I was trying to plan out my schedule of when I could start client number two, I could look at this capacity planner, which I said before I do in Excel. I don't actually do it directly in ClickUp, but I can look at this capacity planner and know, okay, if it's a one and a half and three paths pattern, when can I put the next appointment in? Assuming someone wants to start immediately. Right now. This is today. You are here, right? We're on today, beginning of week one. We've got five hours in the whole week. When could the next person start? Well, it would be pretty natural for me to say, oh, we can start this week. See any problem with that? Let's try it. All right, so just to kick us off, we know it starts with an hour and a half the first week when we kick things off, assuming everyone goes on schedule. But then in week two, it takes three hours. So by visually mapping this, we already see we have a problem. So we could go ahead, we could get them started this week. But in week two, all of a sudden, we are in a crisis where we do not have enough capacity in our 5 hour max per week to serve, fully serve that client in week two. So the correct answer for when can we bring on this next client? Client is indeed not this week. Whoopee. Let me see if I can backspace enough, but would actually be next week. I know I sound really silly here, but I wanted to give this tool, this exercise, or this framework for how to think about scheduling to help you start thinking about how process mapping, the workflow stuff, we're talking about how it connects to the rest of your business. So here we go. Now we've got this service. We tell them we can start next week, and we know that that is the case based on the estimated time it takes to complete each step of the process in the estimated turnaround. Now, this is mapping for an intensive service, probably the easiest service to structure. We prep, we meet, we do the thing, you're done. And already we caught ourselves almost overbooking ourselves by not planning out for the segue or for the kind of the long haul of how long it takes to actually deliver the thing. But if you were running a web design business or you're doing book coaching or you're implementing software for people, this timeline is going to look a lot more complex. The shape, for example, of your service is going to look different. So, for example, let's just create another service. Let's call it over here. I'll make it. Let's make IT Gray Service 2. Let's imagine it's a more sophisticated service. I'm not going to map out the whole thing. It takes one hour to get started. You take a week off, then it takes four hours for your kickoff. This is also an argument to keep your services simple, because you can start to imagine how this becomes challenging. This gives us a visual way of mapping a process that is difficult to really picture in a tool like ClickUp, where it says estimated time, but it doesn't take into account how that time is distributed over given weeks. So here we see, like, this could be a web design service. Maybe you do prep assignment, then you get together for like a big kickoff, then you have some prep work to do. You do a check in, you show them the first brief, or you prep the first brief, you go over the first brief, you design it, you do the wireframe, whatever it is, they have some time for. Revisions like this could very easily be the iterations of some kind of design service. And immediately we're seeing how the shape of this service, the actual structure in terms of how much capacity it takes up is, is different. It's really different than what we see for a more simple service. So is there a version of that spreadsheet you mentioned? Of course there's a version of the spreadsheet. I have not made it public yet. I would be happy to. I've shared it, I think, on a few different occasions, just with individuals who found it useful. It is really this basic though, Christine, so it's silly. I have all the spreadsheet shops that you could think of, but I have found no easier way to model this service than literally copy and pasting shapes as if Excel was a bunch of fun little blocks. I'm waiting for the SaaS platform to come out that is able to do this and if they do and they steal my idea, I think that'll be worth it because I've been modeling capacity this way for a while and I just find it so much more helpful than ours or anything that's more data oriented. So let me know if that helps. I'd also love to hear how you're doing this because I created this method for myself after trying tons of different ways to keep track of when can the next client start, when is this client going to be finished. And this is what I found that works. So it's been a journey. All right, so let's go in and map another service here. Let's imagine we have. I will not map service number two because that sounds terrible. Let's just imagine we have kind of a coaching service where you're doing a one hour a week session and every two weeks you prepare an assignment for them or something. When we have more services in our business, we are effectively creating more shapes. So here we see one, we've got two. One two one or one two one two one two. This makes our game of Tetris a little bit harder because now we are accommodating more shapes. This is another argument for why you want to have productized services. Because if you want to be really effective in how you use this space, you want to keep things of a complimentary size. So if I have a five hour work week, let's just imagine, let's just dream about that. If my service number one, the first one I said was a four hour in week two service, that would be really ineffective because I effectively this is what it would have to look like. Let's just delete these. I would not be able to have simultaneous projects happening because of the limitations of my capacity. I would have to have this second project starting much later, which has implications for customer experience, has implications for onboarding. It has so many different implications. But this is what happens when I know my capacity, I know the time things take, I know what I want the experience to be. So as much as we are designing our services and then putting them on the capacity board, whatever you want to call this, I call it a capacity tracker or capacity Tetris as much as it informs one way in terms of the process of our service informs our capacity tracker. Our capacity tracker can inform our service. If we know we have five hours, we definitely don't want to have a service that is more than three hours in any given week because we know we're going to max ourselves out and spread out that timeline like we just saw. So here we have that service number two, this green one over here, service two. I'm using colors to represent. I'm a little tricky there. But let's just imagine each color is a customer. That's how I organize it for myself, to keep track of projects. This one here would actually fit really nicely into the model of what we have. Assuming we have a five hour week, we've got this. So this is a service number two for a different customer coming into our process. This fits really nicely because we know we have two extra hours on any given week, that we have an active service one. So having a service that takes two hours of our fulfillment time a week would actually be a good compliment to keep us at full capacity. If I had dined this to be three, three hours a week during the fulfillment phase, that would be less than ideal because I would have to push back when I could start it and things start clashing together. It's an exciting day. Oh, thank you. Google My business Robocallers. Appreciate that. So yes, that is kind of one way of capacity planning and it's. I find it to be the most helpful way. I would love to hear how other people are doing this, talked about the different pieces, talked about how they inform each other so you can design your services to complement and fit together in your week. Let me talk about two common questions I've gotten before when I talk about this method which seems a little eccentric and spreadsheet loving, but I promise it's just pretty shapes. What about your team or what about vacation? How do you get to this five hour number to know what your capacity is? What for fulfillment? That's really what we're talking about today. Service delivery, fulfillment. Because we're designing the services. I got to this five hour by making it up. But in reality how you get to this five hour is take your work week and figure out what is more important than fulfillment to you. So perhaps that is sales, perhaps that is family, perhaps that is fitness, perhaps that is marketing and whatever is left, that is fulfillment. The other way around than what you might be thinking about normally rather than just saying I have 40 hours of fulfillment available, we need to take out the more important things. And whatever is left in your week is fulfillment. If you have multiple people in your business. So say you have a subcontractor. This is kind of the. Let's say I have a. Let's say I work 50 hours a week and I have a contractor who just does 10 hours a week, general admin stuff. Maybe she's a virtual assistant. Oops, let's make that shape smaller to be a little bit more proportional. That's not really 20%, but you get the idea her capacity. She doesn't have time on any of this stuff. So sales, sales and such, she's not doing any of that. Her time is entirely available to fulfillment. So to get my total number of hours, I would add, say I have 15 hours a week and she has 10 full hours with no interruptions. Actually, even she would have a little interruptions. Let's say eight after meetings and email. Just other stuff. When we combine those numbers 8 +15, that's 23 hours of fulfillment a week that you have available. If there is a week that you have a vacation that someone is out of the office. The way I like to track that is again, picturing this on a spreadsheet here. Forget the usual. 23 hours is the usual. If you know that it's your birthday weekend on week four here, which we could put the actual date, let's say the end of July. July, blah, blah, blah. Each of these could have an actual date in them. You could just very simply block out those weeks based on not being available. So I quite literally block out in a dark color, usually black or gray. Anytime my staff tells me that they're going to be on vacation, anytime I want to be on vacation, anytime I just feel like I need a break. I block off fulfillment time for when I need to do quarterly planning. And I know that's going to take extra time that week. Holiday, Christmas. I mean, whatever you celebrate, you know, Hanukkah, do your thing. Whatever you need to take time off for, block off those blocks. And for those weeks, you have less availability and you schedule accordingly. This to me is much more powerful than putting time on your Google Calendar. Because when you are looking at your Google Calendar, you are in the weeds. I mean, I've done it and many of you probably have too. Where you're on a call, they're like, when can we do our next appointment? You look at your Google Calendar, you're like, tomorrow. Because back up in this example, technically you could accommodate it tomorrow, but could you actually fulfill the remaining steps of the service on the timeline you want to fulfill them. If you started tomorrow, probably not. And that's where this visual capacity Tetris, sloppy as it looks here, I really tried. It can be a really, really powerful tool. So I will share the actual spreadsheet. Let me know if you'd like that. I will polish it up and I will share the link below here if that would be helpful to you. Just leave a comment on here and I might, yeah, I might clean that up a little bit for you so it's a little bit less messy. But this is precisely how I schedule projects. Know the pacing, know the runtime. It does not account for client time commitment because usually I don't have good measures of that everyone overestimates or underestimates. But for my team time, I know these blocks based on what's scheduled and also checking historical data because I do track my time. So I know on average that week two takes or these three tasks in week two take this many hours. So a lot of context there. But blocking out times for holiday, forming your services two way communication process and using your historical data, using your time tracking to figure out how many blocks a service really is not what you think it is, what it really is will help you create these shapes which create your services and then just guide your business. So that's it for today. Tell me if I'm crazy, if I'm just the eccentric person who likes to use pretty shapes to distinguish what's going on in my business, but that's kind of the way I manage everything. So quick question came in. Fulfillment. Yes, yes, for any kind of project. So comment here is about using fulfillment for other types of work. It's not client service, it's figuring out how many articles you can put out in a month or figuring out when to start the next project. I mean this really applies to anything. Anything that's semi standardized. So writing blog posts, creating YouTube videos, when should you start the next one based on an average pace of what you know. This also keeps you from having tons of things in progress because back in this example, if I had started this green, or if I had started the other project when we were using blue, if I had started it too early, what would have happened is I would have started and then I would have said we can't meet this week, we're going to need to meet next week, let's just do that half, we'll do that. Then all of a sudden a two week project which is two weeks in my brain space worrying about them hoping they're okay becomes three weeks, becomes four weeks becomes five weeks Because I'm letting my Google calendar tell me when I'm available rather than my actual capacity tracker so love the use case of non business stuff and yes visual right this just I think my team's still quite overwhelmed with it. They don't want to touch it with a 10 foot pole but for me it really helps that top down management. So unless there's any other comments, give me some. Just let me know if you want the template if I see a few votes for it it'll be worth like sprucing it all up and I will share it out with you and that's it for this video. So tune in next week. I'm not sure what I'm going to be talking about next time. This one really just felt this really felt like an important topic to talk about right now. So that's where it came up. But if you have any suggestions I cut myself out. If you have any suggestions for what you'd like to have talked about next week, whether it's ClickUp, whether it's a workflow, a phase of a workflow, or a process for documentation noodling a bunch of ideas, I would love your thoughts. But I alright, one vote for the template noted. I am in a house without air conditioning so I think it's making me more creative. But I do need to get off of here and turn on the really loud fan. So thank you all for watching. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.