How to plan your agency’s resources in 2023

For an agency, resource planning is one of the key factors in smooth and successful operations. Essentially, good resource management can help you determine whether you have the capacity to deliver current and expected work, whether you need to bring in freelance support, or even hire new recruits.

Recent times have added some further challenges to agency resource forecasting, with an increased trend for hybrid work making it harder to know exactly what everyone is working on. But while peaks and valleys can be a somewhat inevitable part of agency life, with a few calculations you can plan your resource smartly and competently.

How to get your resource planning right?

Remember, time is everything
For an agency, time is your commodity. This is what you sell and how you make a profit. So it makes sense that this is the starting point in your resource planning. The first thing to do is understand how much time you currently have available to sell.

This means working out how much each team member has available to do billable work, which is their ‘utilisation’ rate. What do I mean by this? Well, it’s clear that some team members don’t have billable hours, like resource managers or finance teams. But for those who do, the planners or doers, not every minute of every working day will be payable. Think about tea breaks, toilet breaks, meetings/briefings and lunch. Not to mention things like pitches, internal jobs and new business.

To work out a utilization rate for each...