By Becky Smith, Steward of Operations, Behind the Board

Building without building the capacity to sell it.

There’s an out of home operator who’s been heavily focused on development. The strategy made sense. Build the assets, create value, eventually sell them. But while the structures were going up, the sales capacity wasn’t keeping pace.

Twenty new digitals don’t just create opportunity. They create work. Someone has to sell those 160 slots. Someone has to manage the contracts, collect the artwork, schedule the creative, invoice the advertisers, handle the leases, and keep it all moving.

It shows up everywhere, not just in development.

An owner developing new sites while still running day to day operations. A salesperson buried in admin work instead of prospecting. Follow up that only happens because somebody remembered. Software a company pays for every month while still doing the same task by hand.

“It’s faster if I do it myself.”

That one gets a lot of us. It’s usually true, too. That’s what makes it so hard to stop doing.

I’ve lived this outside of OOH.

My husband and I recently expanded our rental portfolio and found out the way we’d always run things couldn’t hold the growth we wanted. The business hadn’t hit capacity. We had.

The real question.

You don’t just need capacity to grow. You need capacity to support what you grow. That’s the conversation Jonathan Graviss and I are bringing to Unleashed 2026, Tuesday morning, in our breakout, Buy Back Your Time.

We’ll ask one question every person in this industry should be able to answer. If I gave you five hours back every week, would you know exactly what to do with them?

You can’t create more hours. But you can create more capacity.

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