The phone rings and it is work. Good work, from a customer you want.
You look at the calendar, see some white space on Thursday, and say yes.
Then Thursday arrives, the panel change from Wednesday ran three hours over, the supply house did not have the breaker, and you are calling somebody to say you are not coming. That customer will remember that phone call much longer than they will remember the job.
Capacity is not the white space on the calendar
The calendar shows hours. It does not show the drive to the far side of the county, the supply run, the inspection you have to be present for, the quote you promised by Friday, or the twenty minutes on the phone with a customer about work you did last month.
All of that is real, all of it consumes the day, and none of it appears in the block you just filled.
Which is why shops that look busy on paper feel overwhelmed in reality. The calendar was measuring the wrong thing.
Work out what your week can actually hold
Crew hours available, average hours per job, and the time that disappears into things that are not the job. What comes out is the number of jobs you can genuinely deliver in a week.
Your numbers
What that means
You have room for 9.3 more jobs a week. That is $266,933 a year of ceiling you are not touching. Marketing makes sense right now.
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This is an estimate
This tool returns an estimate based on the numbers you entered. Your real result depends on your own costs, rates and conditions. Check it against your own records before you make a decision with it.
How to run it, step by step
- 1Count crew hours, not clock hours. Number of people who actually turn wrenches, times the hours they are on site. The office does not count and neither do you if you spend the day quoting.
- 2Use the real average hours per job. Look back at your last twenty jobs and average them. Include the ones that went long, because those are the ones that eat a week.
- 3Take out everything that is not the job. Drive time, supply house runs, permits and inspections, quoting, and the callback on last month's work. In most electrical shops this is a large share of the day and it is why the calendar lies.
- 4Leave room for the emergency. Something will come up. If your week is booked to a hundred percent, one urgent call blows up four appointments and you spend the day apologising instead of working.
How to read what it gives you
- The job count is what you can deliver well, not what you can cram in. Booking above it is how you turn a scheduling problem into a reputation problem.
- Compare it to what you actually booked last week. If you booked more, that is where the late arrivals and the missed windows came from.
- Run it with one more person on the crew. That tells you what a hire would add in delivered jobs, which is a far better basis for that decision than a gut feeling.
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What to do with the number
If you are booking above it, that is where your late arrivals come from. Not from bad luck. From arithmetic. Book at or under capacity and the same crew delivers the same work without the apologies.
If you are booking well under it, you have room and the constraint is demand. That is a marketing and response speed problem, not a delivery problem, and the fix is completely different.
If capacity is lower than you expected, look at what is eating the day before you look at hiring. In most electrical shops the biggest single loss is trips to the supply house, and the fix is a proper material list at quoting time rather than a discovery at nine in the morning.
The three hours nobody counts
Supply runs. Two a week at forty-five minutes each is most of a job's worth of time.
Quoting between jobs. Stopping to write a quote in the truck costs more than the quote is worth. Block it. One or two windows a week, everything gets done then.
Callbacks. Every callback is unbillable time on work you already delivered. If callbacks are eating real hours, that is a quality or a documentation problem showing up as a capacity problem.
Why this matters more as you grow
At one truck, you feel capacity directly. When the day is full, you know.
At three trucks, you do not feel it any more. Dispatch fills the calendar, the crews absorb the overrun, and nobody tells you that everybody is running late every day until the reviews start arriving.
Knowing the number and dispatching to it is what separates a shop that grows cleanly from one that grows into chaos.
Questions people actually ask
Should I book to a hundred percent of capacity?
No. Leave a buffer for emergencies and overruns. A shop booked to the limit is one urgent call away from a day of angry customers, and in this trade the angry customer is the one who writes the review.
What if I turn work away and they never come back?
Some will not. But a customer who was told honestly that you are booked until Thursday is far more likely to come back than one who was promised Tuesday and got Friday. Overpromising costs more customers than saying no does.
Does more capacity mean hiring?
Sometimes. Very often the first several hours a week come back from routing, from a supply list that stops the extra trip, and from quoting in a block rather than between jobs. Look at the unbillable time before you look at payroll.
How do I handle service calls and project work together?
Separate them. Trying to run both out of one calendar means the service calls constantly interrupt the projects and both run late. Most shops that grow past a couple of trucks end up dedicating people to one or the other.