More projects, same team: what has to change first

Ten projects run on memory and a good team. Fifty do not. What breaks first is not the work: it is knowing who holds which version, what was approved, and what the client has already been told. One record per project, open to your client and your partners, is what keeps that from growing faster than the work.

Key takeaways

• A client portal raises how many projects one coordinator can carry: Ziggu customer Bauwsteen guides up to 120 units per year, compared to 70-80 before.
• Growth rarely stalls on the work itself, it stalls on coordination: the same question asked three times, in three channels, with three answers.
• A client portal moves the answer to the project, so a client checks the status without a phone call and nobody on the team repeats themselves.
• Approvals kept with a name and a date remove the rework that quietly eats the capacity a growing firm just paid for.
• Hiring adds coordination of its own: a new coordinator needs handover, context and a shared record before they add any capacity at all.

The follow-up grows faster than the work does

The follow-up around a project grows faster than the project itself, and it is the first thing to break when a firm takes on more.

The plan changes on a Tuesday. The kitchen fitter hears about it on Thursday, and the client hears about it from the kitchen fitter.

Nothing in that chain is anyone’s fault. It is arithmetic. Every extra project adds the people around it, and each of those people needs the same answer at a different moment. That second number is the one a growing firm actually has to manage.

Capacity: what one coordinator can carry

One coordinator carries more projects when every project keeps its own record, because the hours that disappear in a growing firm go into finding things rather than into deciding them.

Judith Wauman runs Bauwsteen, which coordinates customer care on residential projects for property developers. She works from one dossier per home: buyers find their plans and their next step there, showrooms upload their proposals to the same place, and contractors see the approved version. Her capacity moved with it. She guides up to 120 units per year, compared to 70-80 before, without adding a colleague or an administrative layer. The full account is in the Bauwsteen story.

“99.99% of mistakes are caused by poor communication. With Ziggu, many errors can be prevented through clearer communication with clients and contractors”, says Judith Wauman, owner of Bauwsteen.

Maarten Brantegem of Ablimmo states the same arithmetic from the other side: “We don’t have a lot of people here, just about five or so. But we handle some thirty to fifty projects at the same time. That’s a lot of paperwork.”

Five people, fifty projects. That ratio holds only as long as the record holds.

Chris Carmichael of Glam Living expected to solve it by hiring: “I said I didn’t want to hire an extra employee, but it turns out we did because Ziggu is the ideal new team member for us.” A new hire needs onboarding, context, and someone to explain what was agreed in March. A shared record needs none of that.

The cost lands on site, not in the inbox

A coordination failure in a growing firm gets paid for on site, on the day a crew stands waiting or something goes in according to a drawing that is two weeks old.

That is why the client portal question is really an approvals question. A choice made verbally on site is a choice nobody can produce three months later, and the argument that follows costs more than the change itself did.

Recorded with a name and a date, the same choice stops being contested. The client sees what they approved, the contractor works from one version, and the coordinator spends the afternoon on the next project instead of reconstructing the last one.

One project record against email and a shared drive

The difference between a shared drive and a client portal is not a feature list. It is where the truth sits, and what happens to it when the number of projects doubles.

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Read that as a set of axes, not a feature list. At ten projects every row on the left is survivable: you remember who holds which version, and the one person who knows is usually at their desk. At fifty, each row turns into a daily tax, and it is paid by the person you can least afford to slow down. The rows also compound. A missing approval costs an afternoon on its own, and a week when the plan it belonged to has moved twice since.

Whether a portal genuinely cuts the volume of client mail is a separate question with its own answer, and it is worked out in our piece on client portal software and email chaos.

What growth asks for first

Growth does not ask a project business to work harder. It asks it to stop carrying the coordination in people’s heads, because that is the part that does not scale.

One record per project. One place the answer lives. One version everybody builds from.

The firms that take on more work without adding people are rarely the ones with the biggest teams. They are the ones where nobody has to ask twice.