Firms hire because the founder feels at capacity. Frequently the capacity is there and it is pointed at the wrong work.
Two weeks of where the hours actually go, in rough categories. Client-facing, operational, administrative, business development, and firm-building.
Almost nobody has done this and almost everybody is surprised.
A minority of the week is client-facing. Most is operational and administrative work that accumulated one reasonable decision at a time.
That is not a capacity problem. It is an allocation problem.
Because the hours are genuinely full. The feeling is accurate; the diagnosis is not.
The question is not whether you are busy. It is whether you are busy with the work only you can do.
Remove the work, by eliminating it or outsourcing it. Delegate it, which requires someone to delegate to. Or accept it and hire for growth.
Most firms jump to the third, which is the most expensive and the slowest to pay back.
For each recurring task: would a client pay for this specifically, and does it require your judgement?
If neither, it should not be on your desk regardless of how efficiently you do it.
Not hours. The capacity that matters is the ability to think about a client situation properly, and that is consumed by fragmentation more than by volume.
A day with six interruptions has less capacity than a day with the same hours and none.
When the client-facing time is already the majority and clients are being under-served. Then hire, and hire properly.
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