Here's how embattled businesses can make smarter staffing decisions to weather the economic storm that 2025 is throwing at us!
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In 2025, professional service firms and project-based businesses face growing economic pressure, as staff costs increase but growth stagnates.
In the US, slowing GDP growth and rising labor costs, combined with a tight labor market, make hiring more competitive and costly. Meanwhile, across the pond, UK firms grapple with slower growth, looming tax increases, and global uncertainties.
When revenue becomes unpredictable but staff costs continue to rise, effective resource management becomes a key economic lever.
This article explores how smart resource management can ease the economic pressures associated with staffing, so you can weather whatever the economy throws at you.
We hate to dwell on the negatives. But you can’t have the rainbow of resource management without the rain of economic pressure – and right now the clouds look grey and gloomy.
In both the US and Europe, professional service firms are facing tough economic times. When staff expertise is what you're selling, you need to turn a healthy profit from every hour billed.
But a tight labor market and rising wages mean your margins are getting slimmer. Throw in general economic uncertainty, tariff confusion, and ever-present tax burdens, and it’s starting to feel like a perfect storm.
(Facts correct at time of writing: July 2025)
In this landscape – where expenditure is certain to grow but revenue isn’t – effective resource management offers a practical way for staff-intensive firms to ease economic pressure.
By improving workforce planning, boosting resource utilization, and increasing visibility over your people and projects, resource management helps businesses stay flexible, efficient, and in control – no matter what the economy throws at you.
Here are some tactics you need to know.
Economic pressure isn’t a passing shower; it’s an ongoing storm, and you need more than an umbrella to protect you.
Resource management is more like an ark, getting you out of the rain and sailing you to sunnier climes – where costs are controlled, projects are profitable, and capacity matches demand.
Here are some of the top financial challenges facing businesses right now – and how resource management can ease those economic pressures.
In resource intensive operations, your people are your biggest investment and your biggest expense. You need to treat their time like money – because it is. If you’re not closely tracking how that time is spent, it’s easy for profits to erode. Over-serviced projects and untracked budgets make margins disappear.
Resource management gives you the data you need to understand how every hour is being used and whether it’s driving revenue.
It starts with tracking resource utilization: the percentage of time each team member spends on billable work vs non-billable or unassigned time.
For example:
Monitoring utilization also helps identify misallocated time. If your lead programmer is spending 10+ hours a week on internal admin, that’s not the best use of their expertise or your budget. You can shift those tasks to a lower-cost resource and free up your specialist for client work that brings in the bucks.
By surfacing spare capacity, utilization monitoring improves operational efficiency and increases your productivity, without increasing headcount. You may even surface or create enough free time to take on additional work, further boosting your bottom line.
Higher wages and rising expenditure mean you need to get the most profit out of every project. But poor forecasting, misaligned resources, and lack of oversight can quietly turn a healthy profit margin into a lamentable loss – and by the time you realise, it’s too late to fix.
Resource management helps you run more profitable projects by giving you tighter control over delivery, so things don’t slip without you noticing.
It starts with better planning. You can build accurate forecasts for time, people, and budget based on previous projects, so your estimates reflect reality, not guesswork. That lays the foundation for more realistic pricing, intentional profit margins, and clearer project scope.
During delivery, you need to regularly track actual time and budget against your forecasts. If a job is running behind schedule or burning budget faster than expected, you can make informed decisions about how to course correct before it’s too late.
Post-project, you can analyse exactly what went well (and what didn’t) so future estimates are even sharper, pricing more accurate – and the margins you aim for are the ones you achieve.
In professional service firms, capacity = cost. Hiring too early drains your cash. Hiring too late burns out your team. Layoffs are expensive and avoidable. Turnover is disruptive and undesirable. To avoid overspending on staff, you need to be an expert matchmaker, balancing workforce supply with client demand.
Resource management provides the visibility you need to dodge financial drains. By comparing your future project pipeline with current team capacity, you can see exactly when extra support will be needed and what kind of skills you actually need.
For example:
Scenario planning is a valuable resource management practice here. This is when you plan for different potential scenarios – like winning Project A but not Project B. By planning different resource schedules in advance, you’re ready to act confidently when a situation arises.
You can also use skills management insights, upskilling, and cross-training to make your existing team members more flexible and able to fill a wider range of roles, potentially reducing your reliance on external hires.
And let’s not forget your resources are living, feeling human beings. Resource management helps you create sustainable workloads – and provide career development opportunities – that create happy and healthy teams, avoiding the cost of replacing bored or burned-out employees.
Delayed invoices. Shifting project schedules. Unexpected overspend. Client disputes. Cash flow can be unpredictable in professional service firms. But your people still need paying, whether the client has or not 🙈 Resource management can help make cash flow more even.
Resource management gives you the real-time data you need to balance spending against revenue, and avoid overexposure. You can track how actual project spend compares to your forecast, so if budgets are burning too fast, you can intervene before you overspend.
It also helps you take control of cash flow by giving you visibility into future workload and staffing costs. When you can identify drops or spikes in demand, you can be strategic about workforce planning and improve cost efficiency (see above).
And don’t forget the value of accurate invoicing. By introducing time tracking, resource management helps ensure your invoices reflect the real work delivered – meaning they’re less prone to quibbles and quicker to get paid.
We’ve covered the four main ways resource management can ease economic pressure on your business. But there are even more benefits to resource planning that can strengthen your position and boost your bottom line.
In unpredictable times, businesses need to anticipate and optimize what they can. With better visibility into future availability and demand, you can respond faster to changing economic conditions – whether that’s knowing you have capacity to onboard a new client, or pausing recruitment when cash flow starts creaking. Resource management tools provide the data to do that quickly and confidently.
Resource management lets you assign people more strategically, ensuring every project gets the people it needs to deliver great results – and priority projects get their pick of your top talent. This all contributes to higher client satisfaction and retention, which lowers acquisition costs overall. Your results speak for themselves – and happy clients advocate for you, too.
A strong employer brand makes recruitment easier and faster. Resource management helps you balance workloads fairly, protect well-being, and provide career development opportunities. In a tough hiring market, being known as a company that values people can make you an employer of choice, cutting hiring costs.
When the economic outlook is uncertain, professional service and project-based businesses can’t afford to leave staffing, scheduling, or spending to chance. You need more control over your costs, more confidence in your forecasts, and more flexibility to adapt as things change.
That’s exactly what resource management delivers.
With the right tools in place, you get real-time visibility into capacity, costs, and performance – so you can staff your business with the right people at the right time, and keep projects on track.
Runn is built for this. Our intuitive resource management platform helps forward-thinking businesses plan better and schedule smarter – protecting their profits, people, and brand.
Explore how Runn can help your business navigate today’s economic pressure and come out stronger on the other side.
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