The Feast or Famine Staffing Problem
Monday morning. An executive pings me to chat and dread hits me.
“We just won three new clients. We need to hire. Like, now. Can we bring on five designers and three copywriters in four weeks?”
I start talking through the reality of hiring that fast. Sourcing. Interviews. Offers. Onboarding. The executive is barely listening. They need people working or we can’t deliver the work.
We hire aggressively. Twelve people in six weeks. The team is stressed but excited. New projects. Growth. Momentum.
Three months later, the same executive pulls me aside again.
“Two of those clients put projects on hold. Another one’s scope got cut in half. We don’t have enough work to keep everyone busy. What do we do?”
This is the cycle. Feast or famine. We need everyone yesterday. We have too many people today. And HR is supposed to somehow staff for both realities at the same time.
Agencies go from “we need 10 people yesterday” to “we have no work” in a matter of weeks.
It’s not because leadership is bad at planning. It’s the nature of the business. Clients are unpredictable. Projects get delayed. Scopes change. New business wins create sudden demand. Client losses create sudden gaps.
You can’t smooth this out with better forecasting. You can try. But a client can cancel a project with two weeks’ notice and suddenly you have five people with nothing to do. Or you can win a pitch on Friday and need a full team staffed by Monday.
From my perspective, this creates impossible staffing decisions. Do you hire full-time for the busy periods and risk having people sitting idle during slow times? Do you rely on contractors and risk not having the talent you need when things pick up? Do you keep a lean core team and scramble constantly?
None of these options are great. And whichever one you choose, you’re going to be wrong sometimes.
The full-time approach means you’re paying people during slow periods when there’s not enough billable work to justify their salary. Leadership gets anxious about utilization. People get anxious about job security. And if the slow period lasts too long, you end up doing layoffs, which destroys trust and makes it harder to hire the next time you need people.
The temp approach means you have flexibility. When work drops, you just don’t renew agreements. But good temps/freelancers get booked up. When you suddenly need them, they’re not available. And the temps you can get on short notice are often not the quality you actually want on your clients’ work.
The lean core team approach means you’re always understaffed during busy periods. Your full-time people burn out from overwork. Quality suffers because everyone’s stretched too thin. And you lose people because they’re tired of the constant chaos.
When you don’t figure out how to staff for volatility, you lose institutional knowledge constantly. If you’re hiring and laying off based on project flow, people stop trusting that their jobs are stable. Your best talent leaves for companies with more predictable work. And you’re stuck in a cycle of constantly training new people who leave as soon as they’re fully productive.
I watched an agency go through three rounds of layoffs in eighteen months. Each time, they cut people during a slow period. Each time, they scrambled to rehire when work picked back up. By the third round, their reputation was shot. Good candidates wouldn’t even interview because they’d heard the agency was unstable. The agency ended up hiring less experienced people and the quality of work declined.
Quality becomes inconsistent. When you’re staffing up quickly, you don’t have time to be selective. Many times you hire whoever’s available. Some of them are great. Some of them aren’t. And clients notice when the quality of work varies wildly from project to project depending on who happened to be available.
Team morale crashes during slow periods. When there’s not enough work, people start worrying about layoffs. They stop collaborating and start protecting themselves. They hoard whatever billable work exists. The culture shifts from “we’re in this together” to “I need to prove I’m valuable so I don’t get cut.”
During one particularly slow stretch, I watched an agency’s culture completely change. People who’d been collaborative started competing for assignments. Managers started exaggerating how busy their teams were to protect headcount. Nobody wanted to admit they had capacity because it felt like admitting they were expendable. The trust never fully recovered.
You also burn out your core team. If you’re trying to keep a lean staff and rely on contractors to flex up, your full-time people carry the burden of the volatility. They’re working 60-hour weeks during busy times and then expected to just recover during slow times. Except slow times often mean they’re pitching new business or doing internal work, so they never actually get the break they need.
So why is this so hard to solve?
The business model is inherently volatile. Agencies depend on clients who can change their minds, shift priorities, or cut budgets with minimal notice. You can try to diversify your client base or get retainer agreements, but you’re still at the mercy of client decisions you can’t control.
There’s pressure to say yes to everything. When a potential client comes to you with a project, saying “we don’t have capacity right now” feels like turning down revenue. So agencies say yes and figure out staffing later. Which means you’re constantly reacting instead of planning.
Leadership often overestimates pipeline stability. They see potential projects in the pipeline and staff as if those projects are guaranteed. Then half of them don’t close or get delayed, and suddenly you’re overstaffed. Or they underestimate how much a new client win will demand and you’re scrambling to find people.
There’s also no good answer to the temp vs. full-time question. Full-time gives you consistency and culture but creates risk during slow periods. Temps give you flexibility but you sacrifice quality and institutional knowledge. Most agencies end up with some mix, but getting the ratio right is a constant guessing game.
You can’t eliminate volatility. But you can build systems that make it more manageable.
Build a tiered staffing model with clear criteria for each tier. Your core team should be people you need regardless of project flow. They’re your strategic thinkers, your client relationship owners, your quality bar. These are full-time roles and you protect them even during slow periods.
Your flex team is contractors and freelancers you have relationships with. Not randos you find on Upwork when you’re desperate. People you’ve worked with before. Who know your standards. Who you can bring in when you need them and who understand the work is project-based.
Then you have your growth layer. These are full-time roles you only add when you have sustained increase in work. Not one big client win. Sustained. Multiple quarters of growth that suggests you need permanent additional capacity.
The key is being disciplined about which tier people fall into. Don’t make someone full-time just because you like them and there’s work right now. If the work isn’t sustained for more than 6 months, they should be a temp. Don’t keep someone as a temp forever just to avoid commitment if they’re actually core to how you operate.
Create real work for slow periods that isn’t just busywork. Internal projects that matter. Process improvements. Skill development. Pitching new business. These can’t just be things people do when there’s nothing else. They need to be valuable enough that people feel productive, not like they’re killing time until the next client project.
I’ve seen agencies use slow periods to redesign their own website, build case studies, develop new service offerings, or create thought leadership content. The work was real. It contributed to the business. And it kept people engaged instead of anxious.
Build a bench of trusted temps and treat them well. Pay them fairly. Give them interesting work. Keep them in the loop even when you’re not actively using them. If you treat temps like disposable labor, the good ones won’t come back when you need them. If you treat them like valued partners, they’ll prioritize your work when you call.
This means sometimes paying a little more than the market rate. It means being honest about project timelines so they can plan. It means giving them feedback and development just like you would for full-time staff. The investment pays off when you need someone great on short notice and they’re available because they actually want to work with you.
Get better at forecasting by tracking leading indicators, not just current work. What’s in your new business pipeline? What renewal conversations are happening with existing clients? What industry trends might affect client spending? You’ll never have perfect visibility, but you can get better at seeing what’s coming.
One agency I worked with started doing monthly pipeline reviews that included HR. Not just “here’s what we might win” but “here’s the probability and here’s what roles we’d need if it closes.” It didn’t eliminate surprises, but it meant we weren’t starting from zero every time something changed.
Be honest with people about the business model. Don’t pretend work is stable when it’s not. If you hire someone, tell them the reality. Sometimes we’re slammed. Sometimes it’s slow. Here’s how we handle both. People can handle volatility if they know it’s coming and see that you have a plan for it.
Think about when you win a big new client. Instead of immediately hiring five full-time people, you bring in three temps you’ve worked with before to handle the initial surge. You give it a quarter to see if the work stabilizes. It does. You convert one of those contractors to full-time and keep the other two on as ongoing flex capacity. The client is happy. The work gets done. And you didn’t overcommit to headcount based on one client win.
You know your agency’s workload is volatile. You’ve lived through the feast and famine cycles. You’ve seen what happens when you staff wrong in either direction.
The question is whether you’re going to keep reacting to every swing or build systems that let you navigate volatility without destroying your team or your culture.
You can’t make agency work predictable. But you can make your approach to staffing more intentional.
What does your tiered staffing model actually look like? And when work inevitably swings, do you have a plan, or are you just scrambling?