Published September 10, 2026 · Altvina Insights · 4 min read

Your Best People Are Probably Underutilized

In a lot of growing firms, senior people end up doing junior work: tasks go to whoever has an open hour rather than the right fit. A thirty minute check on your own last month shows whether your most expensive hours sit on the right things.

A Thursday-afternoon shape we keep seeing in services firms of this size: a proposal is due Friday morning, and the person who ends up writing it is whoever has the emptiest calendar at four o'clock. Usually that means a founder or the most senior person on the account, because their day is the one that can be moved by choice, and because nobody wants to hand a live proposal to someone who has never written one against a clock.

It works. There sits the whole problem. It works every single time, so it never gets reviewed, and a year later the two most expensive people in the building are doing assembly work with a straight face.

Every firm has two allocation systems

There is the one on paper: roles, seniority, who owns which account. Then there is the one that actually runs the week, which is closer to "who is free right now, and who will definitely not drop it."

Under deadline pressure the second system wins. Our read, and this is judgment rather than fact, is that most owners of growing firms have never seen the second system written down, because it only exists in the gaps between calendar entries.

It also has a quiet side effect on the people doing the work. Gallup's 2024 engagement research, drawn from a large survey of U.S. working adults, found that just 46% of employees clearly know what is expected of them at work, down 10 points from 56% in March 2020. None of this is proof that ad hoc allocation caused it. But if the answer to "who does this" is decided fresh every Thursday, expectations get set in the moment instead of held over time, and it is hard to see how anyone would come away with a clean picture of their own job.

The check: five tasks, one question each

This takes about half an hour and needs nothing you do not already have. Open last month. Calendar, time entries, invoices, sent folder, whatever your firm actually keeps.

Write down the five tasks that consumed the most senior hours. Tasks, not projects. "Rebuilt the pricing sheet for the Henley bid" rather than "client work."
For each one, ask a single question and force a yes or no: could a person one level less senior have done this to the same standard, given the same information and one day of guidance?
No maybes. A maybe is a yes you have not admitted to yet.

The senior calendar is the most honest document in a small company. Nobody writes it to impress anybody. It just records what happened.

Where the answer is yes

Capability sits idle there, and it costs twice. Once in expensive hours spent on work priced as if it were cheap. Once in the person who did not get the rep, which is the cost that compounds, because the reason they cannot do it next quarter either is that they did not do it this quarter.

The same Gallup research found that only 30% of employees strongly agree that someone at work encourages their development, down from 36% in March 2020. In a small firm, encouragement is not a program. Instead it is who gets handed the awkward task on a Thursday.

Where the answer is no

If genuinely nobody else could have done it, that is not a talent problem. Underneath sits a capacity gap wearing a skills costume. The skill lives in one head, it has never been written down or paired on, and the firm is one calendar deep on it.

Worth noticing which flavor of no it is. "No, it needs fifteen years of judgment" is a real answer. "No, because the file is in my email and I never explained the pricing logic" is a different answer wearing the same word.

Reading your tally

Rough thresholds, offered as our working rule rather than a law:

One or two yeses out of five is normal. Small firms flex, and a founder pitching in occasionally is a feature.

Three or more yeses means allocation is running on availability, not fit, and it has been for a while. Nobody decided this. It accumulated.

Zero yeses and five hard nos is not a clean bill of health. It usually means the work is concentrated in one or two people so completely that a single vacation is a delivery risk.

What this check does not tell you

It will not tell you your team structure, your comp bands, or who to hire. Those are bigger questions and they deserve more than a thirty minute pass over last month.

What it does is locate the pattern in specific tasks with dates on them, which is a much better place to argue from than a feeling that everyone is stretched. And the honest first move is usually smaller than a reorganization: pick one of the yeses, hand it to the less senior person next month with a day of guidance attached, and check the quality yourself afterward.

If the quality holds, you have found an hour. If it does not, you have found out why, which was worth an hour too.

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