Is Your Business Really Short on People — or Is Work Getting Stuck?
From CH Coaching

Do you really need more people or is something else slowing your business down?

Last week I ran a session in collaboration with PrivilegHR at the Village Hotel where we used a simple exercise with paper clocks.

Nothing complicated. Three steps. A → B → C.
The goal: get as many finished clocks out the door as possible.

What happened next felt very familiar.

Everyone got busy.
More work started coming in.
More effort across the team.

But output didn’t improve.

In fact, work started to pile up.

By the second round, one part of the workflow was quietly limiting everything else.

This is something I see across local businesses all the time.

When things slow down, the instinct is to:

• bring in more people
• take on more work
• push the team a bit harder

But if the issue is how work is flowing, not how hard people are working, that approach usually backfires.

You end up with:

• more jobs in progress
• more pressure on the team
• and still no real improvement in delivery

In the session, we didn’t hire anyone.

We didn’t ask people to work harder.

We simply:

• focused on the part of the process where work was getting stuck
• reduced the load at that point
• and stopped adding more work than the system could handle

The difference was immediate.

More finished clocks.
Less backlog.
A calmer, more predictable flow of work.

This isn’t about paper clocks.

It’s about how work moves through your business — whether that’s jobs, orders, enquiries, or projects.

If you’re noticing:

• work building up in certain areas
• your team always busy but not getting ahead
• delivery times stretching despite best efforts

It’s worth stepping back and asking:

Where is work actually getting stuck?

Because once you see that clearly, the solution is often simpler than you think.

If you’d like a fresh pair of eyes on how work flows through your business, feel free to reach out for a chat at info@chughes.uk or find out more at https://chughes.uk