I'm Charles Liu, founder and Marketing Director of Cubic Promote, a Sydney-based business employing around 30 people across Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and India.
When demand moves up and down, I don't think the answer is to keep stretching everyone's hours. While that might get you through one busy week, if it becomes the normal response, service drops and people burn out.
What has helped us is looking at capacity before the pressure hits. In our business, you can often see a busy period coming through enquiries, quotes in progress, confirmed orders and hard event deadlines. We use those signals to see where the workload is building and where support needs to move.
The most useful practice has been cross-training people, so we're not relying on one person for a single type of work. If production gets busy, for example, other team members can help with follow-ups, order checks or admin, while the production manager stays focused on the parts that really need their experience.
Having a team across Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam and India also gives us flexibility, but the handover still has to be clear. When people are properly trained, you can spread the load without lowering the standard for the client.
When demand is quieter, we don't try to manufacture busywork either. That's when we can catch up on training, systems, product data and process improvements that are much harder to do during a rush.
My rule is to watch the pipeline, not just the overtime. If people are regularly needing extra hours to keep up, that's telling you something about capacity, process or skills, so you need to fix the cause rather than treating long hours as the solution.
You can't make demand perfectly predictable, but you can make your response to it repeatable. For us, that means spotting the pressure early, moving work to people who are trained to take it, and protecting the team from having every busy period turn into a crisis.
