We use a 50-70-90 rule in order to avoid overbooking, but still being booked enough. It’s like personal life, most likely you’ll know your plans for tomorrow or a week ahead, but the more time it passes, the less likely to know your plans.
We will book for a period of:
-4 to 5 months at 50% of our capacity. 4-5 months it’s a long time, but in any circumstance, we should be able to do half of our usual number of jobs.
-2 to 3 months at 70% of our capacity. 2-3 times it’s not so much in the future, so we can be surer that we have no unexpected staff holidays or delayed projects
-2 to 3 weeks at 90-95% of our capacity. 2-3 weeks are very manageable and we know quite well how many projects we can take
Based on this, you should expect larger projects to take more to book in our calendar, but we should fit small jobs on relatively short notice (by small we understand most projects under £10 000 total value)