Headcount planning template for ecom brands

The Plan sheet has your inputs at the top: revenue this year, next year's target, average loaded cost per person, and net margin. Below them is one row per role, grouped by department, from leadership and growth to customer experience, operations, finance, data, product, and admin. For each role you fill in seats today, seats next year, and whether to automate first. The change and the totals calculate themselves.

Two grey columns show what the Zero Hire Org Chart would keep in that seat and why. They're there as a reference point when you're deciding.

A summary block tracks seats, payroll, revenue per person, and payroll as a share of revenue, today and next year. The Benchmarks sheet puts your revenue per person next to eight public D2C brands, and How to use walks through the steps.

Headcount planning is deciding which roles you'll add, keep, and leave unfilled over the next year, and what that costs against the revenue you expect. At most brands it happens one hire at a time. A new channel brings a new hire, and so do a new retail account and a support queue that doubled after a good quarter. Each hire makes sense on its own, and together they push payroll up faster than margin.

A plan puts all of those decisions on one page, so you can see the total before you sign the offers.

1. Start from real headcount by role. Count full-time staff and contractors who work like staff. Leave out your 3PL and agencies.
2. Set next year's revenue target. Every seat gets judged against it.
3. Sort the roles by what drives their workload. Support, 3PL coordination, claims, and payments work grow with order volume. Leadership, product, and brand grow with the number of decisions.
4. For the roles that grow with volume, decide what gets automated before you hire. Most of the difference between a lean plan and a bloated one comes from this step.
5. Check the result. If revenue per person falls next year, the plan is adding people faster than the business grows. The revenue per employee benchmarks show where public D2C brands land.

The template opens with the $50M brand from the Zero Hire Org Chart: 54 people, about $4.05M a year in payroll at $75K per seat, and $926K of revenue per person. Its example target is 20% growth. Hit that without adding a seat and revenue per person rises to $1.11M.

The rebuilt version of the same brand runs on 26 people. Replace the example with your numbers, or run them in the browser first.

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