When you run an business like an agency (and this is not agency exclusive, I can relate to any kind of consulting services) you have one great challenge at managing your business pipeline.

You need to have enough work to feed the system making it run smoothly and allowing all fixed costs to be covered (and making a profit) but you also can’t have too much work or you will have to find additional resources to deal with it (overwork, outsourcing, freelancers etc).

Anyway, the point of this post is to write about how difficult this can be when you have Client’s who claim they need a project done in a very short timeframe (and for which you will block resources) and then the projects simply stall or move very very slowly and there’s basically very little you can do about it.

It happens all the time so the solution is either to have some internal projects that are not critical so that they can be worked on whenever there is some free slots or you need to have some other projects on a flexible scheduling that you can use to fill in the blanks.