When you reach capacity with your capture management team, you can’t pursue new opportunities. Your employees are already maxed out working with existing clients. If you want to continue expanding your business, you will have to find a way to increase capacity.
How can you address the need to finish more work, on time? You have a few options:
- Do nothing. The surge in opportunities will eventually subside, but you won’t gain any new opportunities during that surge.
- Hire a new employee. Another full-time person would allow you to handle the increased workload and manage new opportunities more easily, but once the surge ends, then you may be overstaffed.
- Bring in a consultant. You can get the expertise you need when you need it and not have it when you don’t need it.
Waiting Out the Work
Doing nothing is one of those decisions that makes a real statement. If you’re at capacity and choose not to expand, that means you are choosing to keep your business at its current level. You don’t want to grow. Not every business owner longs to be a Fortune 500 company. Waiting it out should be a well thought-out strategy, not a way to avoid a wage and labor problem.
Getting Onboard with Growth
If you do want to continue to expand your business, doing nothing isn’t an option. You need to be able to respond to new opportunities. That only leaves you with the choice between a full-time employee and a consultant. So, what are the pros and cons of each option?
Hiring New Staff
Onboarding new staff comes with a relatively high price tag. Before you ever get to salary negotiations, you might have to pay a recruiting fee to find prospects. Winnowing through the list of potential future members of your team is serious work that takes more of your very valuable time. Once you have a few selections, you need to look at the total cost of a particular employee. Salary costs reflect a portion of the total expense of employment. Add on the costs of the benefits package, vacations, stock options, etc., and you could be looking at an additional 40 percent outlay, a significant expense.
Another thing to think about is what happens if the level of work ebbs? You’ve just brought on a new employee, but you don’t have enough work to keep them busy. Every hour spent twiddling thumbs is a waste of corporate dollars. Paying an employee for a year of work when you only need them for a few months is a very expensive way to do business.
Capturing a Consultant
When you know that the level of work is likely to ebb and flow, a consultant might be the best option.
- No training needed. When you hire a consultant, you should hire someone with extensive industry knowledge who needs little to no training before demonstrating productivity.
- Only pay for the help you need. If you pay a full-time employee $50 an hour, the total cost is likely to be $70 or more. For a consultant, you might pay $100 per hour. The difference lies in the number of hours for which you pay. With a consultant, you don’t need to guarantee a specific number of hours each week. Your consultant might come in for one or two days a week, and you only pay for that time.
- Get more experience for your business. Hiring a full-time person with more than 20 years of experience would be a lot more expensive than finding someone with five years. With a consultant, you can get that experienced personnel without spending the total cost of the salary – and you often get more work out of a consultant in the same number of hours.
Adding Value with a Consultant
When you choose to go the consulting route, you save money by avoiding the upfront and ongoing costs of an employee. You also give your business the room to expand. A capture management consultant is not always the right solution, but when you don’t have enough work to justify a full-time hire, working with a consultant is a labor expense strategy to explore.
