Agency capacity plan: can you accept this new client?

A new contract does not fit inside “a team of three”. It fits into specific time slots, using the right skills before a deadline. A studio may have spare writing time and no development time at all. Adding those two kinds of availability creates a reassuring total that still cannot deliver the requested website.

Start by restating the decision: “Can we deliver this scope, on this date, alongside the commitments we have already made?” Record the date requested by the client separately from the date your agency is actually ready to confirm. Until those dates align, the sales timetable remains an assumption.

Then choose a planning horizon that covers preparation, production and handover. Two weeks are used as an example in this guide, but a short project may need a daily plan and a long engagement may require several months. The breakdown should reveal periods when a person or skill becomes unavailable, rather than produce an impressive-looking calendar.

The Association for Project Management explains that resource management involves identifying the resources and skills required and when they are needed. This APM introduction to resource management supports the principle; the worksheet below is an original working method to adapt to your agency.

For each person, start with the working time planned for the period, then subtract known absences and activities that cannot be spent producing the project. These may include sales follow-up, administration, internal meetings or recurring support. The purpose is not to judge those activities: they simply consume part of the same resource.

Do not apply an occupancy rate presented as ideal for every agency. A small business whose owner both sells and delivers works differently from a team with a separate sales manager. Use calendars, commitments and, if available, recent time records. An estimate is still useful when it is clearly identified as an estimate.

Above all, avoid counting an hour twice. If a client meeting is already included in the allocation for a committed project, do not also subtract it from general capacity. Choose one convention, write it at the top of your worksheet and apply it to every row.

The result is net capacity before projects. It is not yet free time that you can sell. Signed work, recurring obligations not already deducted and the operating reserve still need to be included. Keep the update date visible: a spreadsheet with no identifiable freshness can create a misleading impression of precision.

One column per person may be enough initially, but it becomes ambiguous when the same person covers several specialisms. If the owner handles design, approvals and sales meetings, do not create three independent capacities that each equal their entire calendar. Allocate that person's time between activities or keep an explicit shared limit visible.

Identify the skills that are essential for the new project: design, writing, development, quality checks, coordination or specialist expertise. For each one, ask who can actually perform the work without additional supervision. Someone learning a skill is not immediately interchangeable with an independent specialist.

The bottleneck is the skill or period that prevents the delivery sequence from working. It can change from one week to the next. A comfortable first week cannot compensate for a mandatory approval that nobody can handle in the final week. Conversely, a substantial workload is not necessarily a problem if it does not coincide with the new requirement.

If you are considering a substitute, add time for handover, explanation and checking. The change may still be worthwhile, but it belongs in the calculation. The useful test is not “someone will be able to help”; it is “this person has confirmed this slot and task, with the required level of independence”.

You do not need a minute-by-minute schedule to make the decision. You need work blocks concrete enough to estimate, assign and check. Replace “rebuild the website” with groups such as content preparation, design of the agreed pages, implementation, testing and access handover. Each block should have a recognisable output.

For every block, record the skill, estimated effort, possible period and what must arrive before work can start. Distinguish effort, measured here in working hours, from elapsed time. Two hours of approval work can hold a stage for several days if the decision-maker is unavailable. That delay is not several days of productive work, but it still affects the delivery date.

Put estimates into three categories: supported by comparable work, approximate but bounded, or unknown and requiring clarification. An important unknown does not become reliable simply because someone assigns eight hours to it. Prepare a question, a technical check or a limited discovery step instead.

Include the finishing work often missing from the first conversation: checks, agreed corrections, documentation and handover. An agency capacity plan should describe what the team will actually have to do, not just what the client will see in the first demonstration.

Copy the following fields into a spreadsheet or your usual tool. Each row represents a skill available during a particular period. If several people contribute, check that their time has not already been assigned elsewhere.

• The period and skill concerned.
• Net capacity before projects.
• Remaining workload from confirmed commitments.
• The reserve explicitly being kept.
• Capacity still available: net capacity minus commitments minus reserve.
• New project workload to place in that period.
• Balance after the project: available capacity minus new workload.
• Any dependency or unconfirmed condition.
• The decision, its owner and the next review date.

A negative balance identifies a conflict to resolve; adding the availability of a different skill does not fix it. A positive balance is not sufficient permission to sell either: the stages must be able to follow one another and the essential conditions must be credible.

The reserve is not an industry standard or a magic percentage. Explain what it protects: small incidents, coordination that cannot yet be predicted or variability already observed. If you consume it to accept a project, make that decision visible and state what will happen if the anticipated event occurs.

Finally, use consistent units. Do not compare available days with estimated hours without a written conversion convention. A few understandable rows are preferable to a complicated sheet whose assumptions nobody can explain.

This example is entirely fictional, designed to illustrate the reasoning rather than describe a client result. A small agency is considering a project requiring development across two weeks. For this skill, it plans 28 net hours each week. Existing commitments account for 18 hours in week one and 12 hours in week two. It keeps a reserve of four hours per week, chosen only for this example.

Availability is therefore six hours in week one and twelve hours in week two, giving eighteen hours in total. The new project requires ten hours in week one and eight hours in week two. At the aggregate level, the eighteen hours appear to match. However, the first week has a four-hour shortfall and the second has a four-hour surplus.

The agency cannot conclude “it fits” without examining the sequence of work. If the four hours can move to week two without delaying an essential approval, a revised schedule may resolve the conflict. If those hours are needed for a presentation already scheduled, moving them is not a neutral change.

The decision is now concrete: change the date, reduce an initial delivery, confirm an additional resource who is genuinely available, or decline the requested timetable. Notice that increasing the price does not, on its own, create the four missing hours during the first week.

Your team's capacity does not control the entire timetable. A project may wait for copy, photographs, an approval or access to an existing environment. Do not automatically hide these items in an “awaiting input” note that later disappears from the sales discussion.

For each important dependency, record the required item, the person responsible for supplying it, the useful delivery date and the work block it affects. Add an understandable consequence: if the content arrives after this date, the implementation stage will be rescheduled. This is not a threat; it makes the sequence visible before a commitment is made.

Do not fill every future slot with work that depends on an uncertain approval. You can show two scenarios: input arriving on the expected date, and input arriving later. In each scenario, check the resources available when work would actually resume. A slot that has been released is not necessarily available the following week.

When the discussion reaches a conclusion, pass these conditions on with the project information. The sales handover checklist complements this work by preserving context. The objective here is first to test feasibility before signing, not to redesign your entire CRM process.

A single estimate does not show what happens when work takes longer than expected. Choose a concrete event connected to the project: content needing rework, a more difficult integration or someone being unavailable for part of the period. Avoid combining every imaginable accident; you want a useful test, not a disaster scenario that makes every decision impossible.

Recalculate the rows affected by that event. Record the cause of the change and a possible response. For example, a technical check may reduce an unknown before signing; a two-stage delivery may move a work block; a different date may avoid an already busy week. Every response must remain compatible with the client's stated need.

If the scenario only works by removing the entire reserve and assuming that the owner will work evenings, write that down explicitly. It is not ordinary capacity to sell without discussion. An exceptional effort may be a one-off management decision, but it should not be hidden inside an estimate described as comfortable.

Also record the test's limits. A worksheet cannot guarantee that no incident will occur, does not measure fatigue perfectly and cannot replace the judgment of the people doing the work. Its role is to make visible the conditions under which your promise is reasonable.

The worksheet should lead to a decision, not merely a comment saying “watch the workload”. Use four distinct outcomes and attach each one to an observable condition.

Accept: the essential blocks fit, the necessary skills are confirmed, important dependencies have an owner and the chosen scenario remains compatible with the promise. Record the exact scope and timetable covered by this approval.

Reshape: the need is relevant, but the requested package does not fit. Offer a useful smaller version, a discovery phase or a different arrangement of deliverables. Do not quietly remove something the client regards as essential.

Postpone: the project can be delivered properly in a different window. Suggest a date based on the worksheet, not a delay chosen simply to keep the conversation alive. Explain what will need to be reconfirmed if the agreement comes later.

Decline: the central constraint cannot be met under the conditions being discussed. A clear refusal is preferable to presenting an uncertain date as settled. You do not need to disclose confidential information about other clients to explain that your capacity does not support this commitment.

Do not assign an average score that allows an attractive price to cancel out an unsolvable bottleneck. Some conditions should prevent acceptance until they have been resolved.

A workable timetable does not automatically make a project economically acceptable. Keep a separate check on costs and pricing rather than turning the workload sheet into an improvised accounting system. Cost assumptions must reflect your own business; this guide offers neither a universal margin target nor a recommended rate.

Bpifrance Création describes demand, competition and costs as complementary perspectives when setting prices. Capacity answers a different question: can you deliver the promised work in the planned period? Both checks must be satisfied; neither replaces the other.

If you use AI for part of the work, do not automatically subtract all the production time a tool claims to save. Record the time you realistically expect to spend preparing, checking and delivering the work, then compare that estimate with available observations. An anticipated gain is not yet a dependable resource.

For a deeper discussion of pricing, see the guide to AI and hourly billing for freelancers. The decision examined here is deliberately narrower: even when an offer looks attractive, check whether it can enter your capacity plan without displacing obligations you have already accepted.

The client does not need every detail of your team's calendars. They need to understand what you can offer, under which conditions and which decision is theirs to make. Build a concise answer from the blocking row rather than giving a general explanation about how busy the agency is.

A fictional reshaping example: “We can produce the priority pages within the requested window if the content is approved before the start. The additional integration does not fit within the same period. We suggest either placing it in a second stage or moving the whole project. Which option best meets your need?”

This wording does not promise a universal turnaround time. It makes a choice connected to this particular project visible. Adapt every condition to verified facts and do not present an option as available until the person who would perform the work has confirmed it.

By contrast, avoid “we will work something out”, “it should fit” or “we will find someone”. Those phrases postpone the decision until after the sale. If something remains uncertain, say what needs checking and base the final commitment on a defined scenario. A clear timetable is part of the offer's quality, even when the answer is a postponement.

A capacity plan becomes useful when it accompanies real decisions. Review the relevant periods before making a new promise and after an important change: a signature, a client delay, an absence, a delivery or a revised estimate. You do not need to rebuild the entire document when only one row changes, but you do need to examine that row's dependencies.

Keep confirmed projects separate from opportunities still being discussed. You can provisionally reserve a window for an offer, provided you define who controls that reservation and when it will be reviewed. Do not sell the same slot to several clients as though it were definitely available to each of them.

When a project ends, compare the estimate with observed effort, if you have that measurement. Look for an actionable explanation: missing coordination work, late content, a more complex task or an overly broad estimate. The aim is to improve the next work breakdown, not turn tracking into a judgment of individuals.

To develop business for future available periods, the SprintLead for agencies page introduces the prospecting product. Do not confuse this sales activity with production planning: the method described here does not require a capacity-management feature. Your worksheet should remain understandable and usable regardless of the tool you choose.