A Fourth Contractor Adds 15 Hours. Delivery Stays at 40.

The Review Ceiling: a capacity case study

If every deliverable needs your approval, hiring another contractor can give your team more work to review while leaving client delivery unchanged. At one boutique consulting agency, my model showed that a fourth contractor would add 15 hours of weekly production capacity, yet weekly delivery would still be capped at about 40 hours.

The Situation

A boutique consulting agency was considering a fourth contractor to keep up with client demand. Clients asked for an average of 50 hours of work a week. Each of the agency’s three contractors could produce 15 hours of client work per week.

Every deliverable went through the founder for final approval. The founder had 20 hours a week for review. Based on the agency’s records, I modeled weekly delivery capacity using 30 minutes of review for every hour of contractor work. The model uses a single review rate across deliverables, though individual reviews can take more or less time.

The Problem

Contractors	Weekly production capacity	Estimated weekly review time needed	Modeled weekly delivery capacity
1	15 hours	7.5 hours	15 hours
2	30 hours	15 hours	30 hours
3	45 hours	22.5 hours	40 hours
4	60 hours	30 hours	40 hours

A review ceiling is the maximum amount of work the available review time can support. When every deliverable needs one person’s approval, that person’s review capacity sets the ceiling.

Review ceiling = weekly hours available for review ÷ review hours needed per hour of contractor work.

The founder had 20 hours for review and needed 0.5 hours for each hour of contractor work. That put the ceiling at 40 hours per week. Delivery is the lower of the ceiling and what the team can produce. With three contractors, the team could make 45 hours, so delivery stopped at 40.

The three contractors could already produce more work than the founder could review.

The Cost of Hiring Another Contractor

Hiring another contractor would commit the agency to 15 more hours of contractor work a week. Those hours would join the queue for approval. Production would reach 60 hours while delivery stayed capped at about 40. The agency would still be about 10 hours short in an average week.

My Recommendation

I advised the founder to increase review capacity before hiring another contractor. A second reviewer could share the approval work. A checklist and template could help the founder review each deliverable faster.

At the modeled rate, roughly 2.5 more hours of review per week would let the agency deliver all 45 hours its existing team could produce. Meeting average demand of 50 hours would also require more production capacity. Addressing review first would let the agency deliver more with the team it already had.

The Founder’s Decision

The founder held off on hiring another contractor and made review capacity the next priority. That kept the agency from committing to more contractor hours while delivery capacity was still capped at about 40 hours a week.

The Lesson

When every deliverable waits for your approval, more production does not raise delivery past your review time. Before you hire, work out how many hours of work your review time can support. If your team already produces more than that, fix review before hiring another contractor.

Where does your work wait for you?

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It’s Handled™ | Operational architecture for founders who built the business and are ready to stop being the infrastructure.

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