Related question
How do we do more with less staff?
Short answer
Look at productivity per person before you look at headcount. As an illustration of the logic rather than a measured result: a ten-person organization with $750,000 in combined salary that gains 20 percent in effective capacity has gained roughly $150,000 of output it did not have to raise. The gain comes from removing repetitive work, not from working people harder.
This is one of the most common questions I hear from executives of small organizations, and it usually arrives with real pressure behind it.
The framing that helps is to think in terms of capacity you already fund rather than money you need to find. Every organization is paying for a certain amount of human attention. The question is how much of that attention is currently consumed by work that produces nothing distinctive: rekeying data, hunting for the right version of a file, answering the same routine question, assembling a report by hand every week.
That is where the recoverable capacity sits, and it is recoverable without asking anyone to work longer.
Two cautions. First, the gain is real only if the freed time gets redirected to something that matters. Capacity that is recovered and then absorbed by more meetings is not a gain. Second, the productivity math above is an illustration of the logic, not a measured result. Your actual number depends entirely on how much repetitive work your operation carries, which is exactly what an operational audit is designed to find.