Scaling is difficult. It’s not easy.
There are many resources out there to help calculate exactly how many Support staff you’ll need. The misleading part is that every company is different and incremental improvements are constantly changing those dynamics and relationships. For example, expanding, refining, and properly organizing your knowledge base will drive down conversations — especially if the changes were massive. Find low hanging fruit (or not so low) so you and your team can be effective. Automate what you can and be a real, live human being where and when you can — we fellow humans appreciate that.
Find people who you can pose these questions to for feedback. As iron sharpens iron, friends sharpen the minds of others. If you are the only strategic thinker, that is not a viable long term plan. We all need to be thinking about long term solutions, growth, trajectory, strengths/weaknesses, and opportunities/threats. And we need to share with each other. We need to verbalize, test, validate, and hear from others. These are some of the best ways to scale a team.
Only after that should we begin calculating and tracking our conversations, the length it takes us to complete, and, thus, the scale we need to hire. There are a lot of considerations (i.e., do we have cash?) to offset the need for more Support teammates. So let’s be smart and use the constraints we’re under to be resourceful and brilliant thinkers.
(for the actual calculators, there are many out there on the web. A simple one can be found at Kayako)
Jeff Beaumont 