Episode #3
Episode 3: Stop Managing Ghost Tasks
Send us your thoughts or what you want to hear more about! Why Your Best People Burn Out When Work Lives in Spreadsheets With Lera Kooper, COO and Owner of Proactive Advisory Group Capacity isn't an operations problem. It's a leadership one. In this episode of Canopy Practice Success , Luke Frye talks with Lera Kooper, COO and Owner of Proactive Advisory Group, about the hard calls a growing firm makes on time and staffing. Every yes is a no somewhere else, and Lera makes that trade deliberately instead of discovering it at the bottleneck. She walks through how she tiers clients, the math behind hiring versus optimizing, and what she says to a client when the firm has taken on too much. She also makes a direct case for keeping time sheets in a fixed-fee firm, not for billing, but as a diagnostic for whether a process has gone stale or a team member needs support. Then she names what she turned down. Marketing spend, Google Ads, and an offer to be acquired, because the client base she already has is the asset she'd rather work first. If you're protecting a high performer who's quietly buried, or deciding between a hire and a better process, this one gives you a framework and the numbers behind it. What You'll Learn How to tier clients before capacity becomes a crisis Why a $100K hire has to produce three times their cost How to tell a client you're at capacity without damaging trust Why ghost tasks are the real threat to your best people Why Lera keeps time sheets in a fixed-fee firm How an acquired client list becomes a lead list Why she turned off marketing spend on purpose Where a firm that skips cloud and AI lands in three years Connect With Lera LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lerakooper/ Subscribe to Canopy Practice Success If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and follow Canopy Practice Success wherever you listen to podcasts.
