Where Your Team's Capacity Is Actually Going (And Why You Can't See It)#
Your team is working 50-hour weeks. You're turning away new clients because "everyone's maxed out." In Hawaii's tight labor market, hiring feels like your only option—but it's expensive, slow, and increasingly difficult.
Here's what most firms miss: your team isn't maxed out on client work. They're maxed out on everything around client work.
Coordination. Searching for information. Manual handoffs. Workarounds that evolved so gradually you stopped noticing them.
The problem isn't lack of capacity. It's that you can't see where your capacity is actually going.
The 60/40 Split Hiding in Plain Sight#
Research from Asana's Anatomy of Work Index reveals something startling: knowledge workers spend 60% of their time on "work about work"—coordination, status updates, searching for information—and only 40% on the skilled work they were actually hired to do.
That 60% doesn't announce itself. It doesn't show up on timesheets as "wasted time."
It just looks like everyone being busy:
- Sarah spends 15 minutes hunting down last month's client file
- Marcus copies data from the CRM into the project tracker (again)
- The team sits through a 30-minute status meeting that could've been a 2-minute update
- Three people spend 45 minutes coordinating a deliverable via email because nobody's sure who owns what
Fifteen minutes here. Twenty minutes there.
Multiply those fragments across your team, across a week, across a year. That's where your capacity went.
But when you look at your operations, you don't see "coordination overhead" or "workaround tax." You just see people working hard. The inefficiency is invisible, so the problem feels unsolvable.
How Your Process Became Unrecognizable#
Think back to when you implemented your current systems. Three years ago? Five?
The tools were supposed to streamline everything—practice management software, CRM, project platforms. Finally, you'd have it all together.
Here's what actually happened:
The system didn't quite fit how your firm actually works. Someone needed a field that didn't exist. A workflow that didn't map to your client types. A report the system couldn't generate.
So your team adapted. Small workarounds at first—"I'll just track that in a spreadsheet." "We'll coordinate closings in our private Slack channel." "I'll keep client notes in a separate doc."
Those workarounds worked. So they stuck. Then they evolved. Then they multiplied.
Now? Those workarounds are your actual process. The system is just... there. Partially used. Generating reports nobody trusts because half the real data lives in spreadsheets and email threads.
Your documented process says client onboarding takes 3 hours. Your actual process—with all the searching, coordinating, manual transfers, and workarounds—takes 5 hours.
That 2-hour gap, multiplied across every client, is where your capacity disappeared.
And because it happened gradually, you can't see it clearly enough to fix it.
Three Questions Most Firms Can't Answer#
Here's a diagnostic. Be honest:
Question 1: If I shadowed your team for a week, would their actual workflow match the process you documented when you implemented your systems?
Most firms laugh at this question. Of course not. But that gap between "how we think we work" and "how we actually work"? That's where capacity hides.
Question 2: What percentage of your team's time goes to coordination versus actual client work?
Don't guess. Can you measure it? Most firms can't. Without visibility into where time actually goes, you're flying blind.
Question 3: How many manual handoffs exist between initial client contact and final deliverable?
Count them. Every handoff is a place where information gets lost, work gets stuck, and 20-30 minutes of coordination overhead gets consumed.
If you hesitated on any of these questions, you're operating with significant blind spots. And those blind spots are expensive.
Why This Matters More in Hawaii#
Here's the reality of running a professional services firm in Hawaii: you can't just throw people at the problem.
Competition for skilled workers is fierce. Cost of living makes salaries expensive. Remote work means your competitors for talent include every mainland firm willing to hire remotely.
Mainland firms facing capacity constraints can often hire their way through it—post a job, get 200 applications, fill the seat in 30 days.
That's not Hawaii's reality. Which means Hawaii firms that scale successfully aren't the ones hiring fastest. They're the ones who can see where capacity is hiding in their current team and systematically reclaim it.
You need a different approach.
Making the Invisible Visible#
You can't improve what you can't see clearly.
This is why the most effective operational improvements don't start with solutions. They start with reality mapping.
Not your documented processes. Those are fiction—written when you implemented systems three years ago and never updated to reflect how work actually flows today.
Not "best practices" from other firms. What works for a 50-person mainland firm doesn't necessarily work for a 12-person Hawaii practice with different client types and constraints.
Your actual workflows. With all the workarounds. With all the coordination overhead. With all the "technically we're supposed to do it this way, but nobody actually does" reality.
Here's what effective reality mapping looks like:
Shadow your team for 2-3 days. Not to judge or criticize, but to observe. Watch where time actually goes. Time the activities. Map where information flows—and where it gets stuck.
Identify every handoff. Every manual step. Every place where coordination consumes time that should go to client work.
Then calculate what it's costing. Not in vague terms like "inefficient," but in actual hours per week, per person, per client engagement.
Only after you can see your operational reality clearly can you make informed decisions about what to change, what to connect, what to automate, and what capacity you can reclaim.
The sequence matters: reality first, solutions second.
Most firms skip the reality mapping because it feels slow. They want to jump straight to solutions. But prescribing solutions before understanding the actual problem is why so many implementations fail—they're solving for documented processes that nobody follows anymore.
What Becomes Possible When You Can See Clearly
Whether I'm mapping workflows at a Fortune 500 supply chain operation or a 12-person Hawaii law firm, I see the same capacity-draining patterns.
When we map actual workflows, here's what we consistently find:
10-15 hours per person per week consumed by coordination and workarounds. Searching for documents. Copying data between systems. Status meetings that could be automated updates. Manual handoffs that create 30 minutes of coordination overhead each time.
20-30% of total capacity redirected away from client work. Not because people are inefficient, but because the systems and processes require it. That's the gap between what your team could handle and what they currently handle.
People working in silos they didn't create. Someone in operations creates a client status report. Meanwhile, someone in accounting creates their own version because they don't know the first one exists. An associate changes how they name files to make their work easier, not realizing it creates 45 minutes of extra work downstream. Nobody's being territorial—they genuinely don't know what others need from them or what information others are already tracking.
Clear bottlenecks that, once addressed, unlock significant capacity. There's always a chokepoint where work gets stuck, information goes missing, or coordination breaks down. Once you can see it, you can fix it.
One global manufacturing company couldn't figure out why customer service was constantly delayed—over 50% of requests were taking weeks longer than they should. When we mapped their actual workflows, we found the same patterns: manual handoffs between disconnected systems, people creating their own workarounds because the official process didn't quite work, and nobody able to see where the bottlenecks actually were.
Once we could map it clearly, the problems were obvious. We redesigned the workflow, connected their systems, and eliminated the coordination chaos. Delays dropped by more than 50%. Backlogs went from months to weeks.
Same patterns. Different industry. Same solution: make the invisible visible, then systematically fix it.
This is how Hawaii firms scale sustainably. Not through heroic effort. Not by grinding longer hours. Through operational clarity that reveals what's consuming capacity, then systematic improvement that reclaims it.
What This Looks Like For Your Firm#
Imagine your practice a year from now:
Your team handles 30-40% more clients, but nobody's working longer hours. The coordination chaos that used to eat everyone's day? It's systematic now. Information flows instead of getting requested. Work moves forward instead of getting stuck.
Your talented people stay and grow instead of burning out and leaving. You're not constantly recruiting in an impossible labor market.
You can confidently answer: "Can we take on this new client?" Because you know where your capacity stands.
That's not a fantasy. That's what becomes possible when you can finally see where your capacity is actually going.
Where Is Your Capacity Hiding?
If you're turning away work because your team is "maxed out," the question isn't "how do we hire?"
The question is: "Where is our capacity actually going?"
Most firms can't answer that question with specifics. They know everyone's busy, but they can't see the coordination overhead, the duplicate work, the bottlenecks consuming 20-30% of capacity.
Here's how to start seeing clearly:
1. Pick one typical client workflow (onboarding, project delivery, transaction closing)
2. Shadow it for a week. Watch how work actually moves. Time the activities. Note every handoff.
3. Ask three questions:
- How many people touch this work?
- How many systems does information pass through?
- Where does work consistently get stuck or slowed down?
4. Calculate what you find. If a "3-hour process" actually takes 6 hours because of coordination, and you do this 50 times a year, that's 150 hours of hidden capacity right there.
Most firms are surprised by what they discover in just one week of observation.
You don't need a consultant to start this work. You need curiosity about your operational reality and willingness to look at it honestly.
Once you can see where capacity is actually going? Then you can decide what to do about it.
Because you can't improve what you can't see. But once you can see it clearly? Everything changes.
About Michelle
Michelle is the founder of Kealani Solutions, helping Hawaii professional services firms build operational capacity for sustainable growth. With over 20 years of Fortune 500 experience in business process optimization and supply chain management, she partners with local accounting, legal, real estate, and AEC firms to scale sustainably in Hawaii's unique market. Based in Hilo, Big Island.
