bass@dmsd.UUCP (John Bass) (04/04/85)
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