The secret to scaling is making better use of your resources. Here are four resource management techniques you need to nail…if you want to scale.
Scaling a service business depends on one critical factor: effective resource management. And this article is going to show you how to do it.
It’s a cliche but, in professional service firms, time really is money. Your people are your product, so who you hire and how you use their time matters more than almost any other decision you make in your business.
When you put their time and talent to good use, you can scale sustainably. But when you don’t, poor resource management decisions erode your profits and ability to grow.
In this article, you’ll discover four ways resource management techniques can help you scale your service business – maximizing productivity without maxing out overheads.
Plus, get real-life insights from Anatta, an e-commerce agency which implemented Runn and now benefits from better forecasting, collaboration, and profit monitoring because of it.
4. Streamline comms to reduce non-billable hours
In a service business, how you use your team's time directly determines profits. When time goes to waste, your margins shrink. The first step to improving this is getting crystal clear about the link between people and profits, so managers spend time as carefully as they would money.
Without clear resource management data, people can lose sight of the key rule of service businesses – time is literally money.
Keep reading: What is Utilization Rate? Know Where You're Earning or Burning Money ➡️
You need to track the right resource management data to make profitable resource decisions.
For example:
This data helps you see the correlation between people and profits, and make strategic decisions on how to staff projects profitably – perhaps even creating productized services you know can make money.
My favorite feature is the project overview report, which shows the gross margin of the project. And it’s not just about tracking the margin, but being able to see what the impact would be on the margin, depending on the different decisions we make." – Emily Lykins, Managing Director at Anatta.
It’s not just about project management in the moment. Monitoring time like money helps you stay focused on the bigger picture too – your plans to scale the business. By keeping you laser-focused on delivering great work – while controlling costs and maximizing project profitability – you’re better placed to achieve your goals.
Every hour your team isn’t billing is an hour of lost revenue, especially with limited resources. Bench time – when billable people are working on non-billable activities – can be costly.
Reducing unplanned bench time gives you an immediate boost to profitability without growing your headcount. That’s low-hanging fruit for firms targeting business growth.
Excess bench time creeps in when you lack visibility into resource management – like allocations, supply, demand, or past project staffing.
You need better visibility into your people, projects, and pipeline – to maximise efficiency and productivity.
In resource management software like Runn, you can create a bench report that shows who’s available and waiting for work. You can also see utilization rates at an individual, team, or company level to check you’re operating efficiently.
Firstly, more of your team’s time is billable, so you increase revenue without increasing costs. This is the epitome of scaling successfully and sustainably – achieving more without more cost. Secondly, your sales team can spot and sell spare capacity, meaning more projects are possible with the same people.
Sales can prioritize selling projects where we have bandwidth. So if they see that, for instance, we’re going to have two people on the bench in a month, Sales notes that they should sell into this role." – Emily Lykins.
In a service organization, hiring is a big investment but it delivers a big impact. Do it well and you’ll have the right people at the right time to deliver profitable projects. But get it wrong and you’ll end up with excess overheads, idle resources, and expertise you can’t sell.
Without real-time data on supply and demand, you can’t identify hiring needs, and recruitment decisions are hit-and-miss.
To improve capacity planning and project management – and get the right skills at the right time – you need real-time, centralized data.
Runn resource management software is really useful for forecasting when we’re going to need to hire. It helps me see the ebb-and-flow of demand and to understand whether a contractor or permanent hire would make more sense." – Emily Lykins.
So much time is lost in ad hoc meetings and manual admin – just to work out who’s available. By streamlining communication and centralizing data in a self-serve dashboard, service organizations can save hours they’d otherwise waste on status updates, freeing people for more billable work or strategic planning.
Keeping everyone in the loop about resource management can become a downward spiral of meetings and manual work.
Centralized resource and project data eliminates all but essential meetings. Project managers, sales, and senior leaders can self-serve live information on capacity, availability, utilization, and more – to make better-informed decisions for the business.
Runn has reduced the time we spend in meetings, decreased confusion, and minimized the incidents of selling projects we weren’t able to staff appropriately." – Emily Lykins.
When you’re looking to scale, every minute matters. When people can access the data they need, your organization is more efficient, billable time increases, and the whole business moves faster.
Scaling a service organization isn’t just about winning more clients and hiring more staff. It’s about growing revenue without necessarily incurring more costs.
To do that, you need to make better use of the time and talent you already have at your disposal, optimizing their billable work and surfacing spare capacity to sell on to clients.
Anatta's success with Runn shows that you can increase productivity, profits, and efficiency without incurring unnecessary overheads or headcount, if you focus on:
If you want to scale your service business successfully – like Anatta – locking in better resource management practices is the smart way to do it. And Runn is the platform – and strategic partner – that can make it all happen.
