Preconfigured protection cycles (p-cycles) provide recovery times for mesh networks that are near the recovery times of BLSR ring networks while providing lower spare-to-working capacity ratios. However, the efficiency of p-cycles defined by the spare-to-working capacity ratio is affected by the topology of the network. An efficient method for adding links to an existing network is required to take advantage of p-cycles. In this work, a heuristic called p-cycle cut saturation (PCUT) is proposed. It extends the well-known cut saturation heuristic to strategically add links to an existing network to lower the spare-to-working capacity ratios in networks using p-cycles. PCUT is applied to a 28-node network to add spans and lowers the spare-to-working capacity ratio by 20%.