Staffing Overheads

[John Bass]

I have had several interesting discussions with people about staffing of
small to medium sized (10-1000 people) companies. It seems that with a
modest R&D activity that a computer manufacturing firm can support about
1 person per $350,000 annual gross sales. I have heard other numbers ranging
from 1/$100k for contract R&D (IE large contracts for development) to
1/$700k for narrow margin consumer products.

The numbers seem to fall back to a ratio of gross projected profit at some
target sales level and the average burdened cost per employee -- fudged to
include capitalization for growth.

In other terms this is about 100 people for a firm selling $35 million in
computer systems a year. I am interested in what numbers other companies
are using to do forcasting VS. what various profitable companies are really
staffed at.

John Bass