hiring moe inexperienced staff doesn't help

I spent more time bringing temporary staff up to speed with projects and explaining our development cycles, methodologies and coding standards that i actually spend doing any work nowadays

A lot of the time quotes for work are trimmed to make them more acceptable so more business is generated. After all the developers and analysts sit down and discuss exactly how long a project will really take and a manager applies that magic formula that inserts extra time for people to take a toilet break every so often, someone further along the line says 'theres no way a 14 month project will be accepted, this has to be ready in January, i'll just change this to 8 months instead and hire a couple of contractors to take up the slack'