Workforce planning for growth: roles to hire, roles to buy

Key takeaways

Workforce planning for a small business is deciding, ahead of time, what capacity the business will need and how each part will be supplied. A one-page plan sorts future work into three columns: roles to hire, capacity to buy and tasks to automate. It replaces hiring by reaction with hiring by design.

• Start from forecast work in hours, not from job titles.
• Three columns: hire, buy, automate.
• Hire for core, full, lasting roles.
• Buy variable, repeatable or part-role capacity.

What is workforce planning?

Workforce planning is the process of working out what skills and capacity an organisation will need over a future period and deciding how to obtain them. In a small business it is a simple annual exercise: forecast the work, compare it with current capacity, and choose how to fill each gap.

• How outsourcing helps small businesses scale without hiring
• Headcount vs capacity: what a growing business really needs

Why plan if you only hire now and then?

Plan because each hire in a small business is a large decision. One role can be 5% to 10% of the cost base. Recruiting commonly takes 4 to 12 weeks, so reacting means being short for a quarter. A plan also stops support roles accumulating one reasonable request at a time.

• Overhiring: what it costs a small business when growth slows
• Step costs: why the next hire is a jump, not a slope

How do you build the plan?

Build the plan from the revenue target backwards. Estimate the volume of orders, clients or projects behind the target. Convert that into hours for each function. Subtract the capacity you have. What remains is the gap, expressed as hours of a particular kind of work.

• 1. Set the 12-month revenue target.
• 2. Translate it into volumes by quarter.
• 3. Convert volumes into hours by function.
• 4. Subtract current capacity.
• 5. Sort each gap into hire, buy or automate.

• Demand forecasting for small teams: plan capacity ahead

Which roles should you hire?

Hire roles that are core to what customers pay for, that will be fully used every week, and that you expect to need for years. Leadership, sales, senior delivery and roles requiring presence belong here. These people carry the knowledge and relationships that make the business distinct.

• Core to the product or client relationship.
• Full-time workload from day one.
• Needed for the long term.
• Requires presence or deep context.

• Core vs non-core activities: what to keep in-house
• When to outsource and when to hire

Which capacity should you buy?

Buy capacity that is repeatable, variable in volume, less than a full role, or needed sooner than recruitment allows. Customer contact, order and booking admin, invoicing, data work and production tasks fit. So do senior skills needed for a few days a month, which can be bought as fractional roles.

• The make or buy decision for business services
• Fractional teams: senior skills without a full-time salary

What belongs in the automate column?

Automate steps that are entirely rules-based and happen often: confirmations, reminders, data transfer between systems, standard reports. Automation reduces the hours in the other two columns. It rarely removes a whole role, which is why it sits alongside hiring and buying and not in place of them.

• The cost of manual processes, and what to fix first

When does a bought role become a hire?

A bought role becomes a hire when the work has been steady and close to full-time for two or three quarters and has become central to the business. Buying first lets you prove the role. Converting too early returns you to fixed cost on unproven demand.

• Scaling an outsourced team up and down: how it works

What does this look like in practice?

A pattern we see in UK firms writing their first plan: the starting list has six hires. After converting to hours, it becomes two hires, about 70 hours a week of bought capacity across three processes, and two automations. Total cost is lower, and the two hires are more senior than originally planned.

• See client work
• BPO Solutions for UK businesses

Workforce planning checklist

Complete this once a year and review it quarterly.

• Revenue target translated into volumes.
• Hours required by function and quarter.
• Current capacity by function.
• Each gap marked hire, buy or automate.
• Loaded cost for hires and quotes for bought capacity.
• Lead times: recruitment, setup, implementation.
• A review date each quarter.

• What scaling a business costs: hire-led vs partner-led
• A 90-day plan to scale without adding headcount

Next step

Send us your revenue target and current team by function. We will draft the three columns with you and cost each option.