There’s a classic business dilemma in which the person in charge of sales is also in charge of marketing.

If this unlucky soul is busy with sales, they won’t have time for marketing. But if they don’t spend time on marketing, they won’t get sales.

It’s a catch-22.

The person who thought they had it made as head of marketing and sales suddenly finds themselves in hot water. They didn’t have the time to do both jobs properly. They couldn’t be in two places in once.

Today, as supply has dwindled and demand has increased, time and people have become the biggest constraints on our supply chain.

If you can’t find two people to handle marketing and sales, what can you do?

Our current supply problems require us to find process solutions instead of simply adding more people to the payroll.

Supply and Demand: Pre-Pandemic

In our industry, the supply chain has traditionally been about people. You could always get more equipment, but you also had to find enough people to do the direct labor necessary for events. If you ran out of people to technically run your events, you stopped selling.

Before the pandemic, when demand was high, the only key constraint was the time it took you to find the people to do the job.

Successful companies dedicated resources to planning ahead, recruiting, and building a bigger bench of employees and freelancers. They looked farther ahead and planned for the people they’d need in the future.

Pre-pandemic, when they got busy, many companies just added more full-time employees to the roster. Problem solved, for now.

There was an ample labor pool, so this was easier than looking ahead and developing an adequate freelance pool.

The trouble is, even at the time, this type of hiring was inefficient. Businesses ended up with more full-time employees than they really needed, even with all that demand. They didn’t feel the pinch because demand was so high. But when the pandemic hit, those swollen payrolls were too much to maintain.

Supply and Demand: Today

Today, the constraint is the same, but timelines are dramatically compressed. A job that used to take six months to prepare now has a six-week deadline.

In the past, businesses would have solved this problem the same way they always had: by throwing more people at it.

But today, a further complication makes that impossible. Today, the labor supply chain has been reduced by roughly 75%.

Workers are not available the same way they were before. Companies don’t have crowds of potential workers waiting by their phones, hoping for a call.

Before, businesses were “too busy” to plan, so they just hired new full-time employees from the abundance of available workers when needed. Hiring full-time people was easier than trying to define needs and plan ahead.

Today, though, that wiggle room is gone. The large labor pool is gone too. So what’s left? What’s left is what we should have been doing all along: redefining and reallocating processes and resources.

Solve Supply Problems With Process Solutions

Recently a client called and told me, “I need to hire some more people.”

He ran through a list of problems he was having: administrative issues, scheduling issues, planning issues. He had additional tasks falling into his lap, like creating graphics for customers.

He had a whole litany of items that, though annoying, still had to be done. He figured if he could just hire one person to do all the annoying things, his problems would be solved.

After peeling back the layers of what he needed, I replied, “If you could find somebody who could do all those things properly, that would be a miracle. But what’s the real underlying issue creating the process constraint here?”

“Isn’t it that I need more people?” he asked.

He probably did need more help. More importantly, though, he needed to quit doing all the annoying things himself. This business owner was spending his time on things somebody else should have been doing.

If an owner stops doing something and pushes it to an employee, that employee must also stop doing something that conflicts with the added duties. They, too, have to push something down the line. This creates a redistribution of priorities based on availability.

We often talk about people wearing multiple hats in an organization. That’s fine, except when the hats conflict in time. In other words, one person can’t do five things that all happen at the same time. It’s asking for the impossible.

You can’t just hire people to fix this kind of problem anymore because they’re not available and because it doesn’t make fiscal sense.

Instead, the solution is to remove process constraints through a systematic reallocation of responsibilities.

Bottom Line

To be successful in light of today’s time and labor pool constraints, you have to rethink your processes.

Businesses should have been redefining and reallocating processes all along. Pre-pandemic owners taking advantage of a large labor pool weren’t as efficient as they might have been.

Now, businesses must focus on process solutions rather than relying on a depleted labor pool. And they have to remember that nobody can wear two hats that conflict in time.

If one employee is responsible for holding open the front door, you can’t ask them to hold open the back door too.

I provided some tips on thinking through your org structure in a previous blog post. Take a look and see what you can apply right now.

You can plan ahead. You can prepare. You can redefine and reallocate processes for a more efficient and profitable business.