85% of your agency’s profitability depends on good management of the time spent on your projects. Although its importance is recognized by many managers, few implement an effective optimization strategy.
Real-time access to schedules and tasks for everyone facilitates coordination and improves productivity. Overcoming these emotional and technical challenges is essential to capture the right metrics, avoid resource waste, and enhance your agency’s profitability.
Based on feedback from thousands of agencies we’ve supported, we have identified 5 essential steps to master time management in your organization.
Measure profitability in real time: is your agency making money?
Traditional tools like Excel or Google Sheets are convenient, but they quickly reach their limits when a team rapidly grows from 5 to 20 members. Data entry becomes a challenge, requiring simplification to manage the expansion effectively. This is where it becomes crucial to master the calculation of a project’s profitability, in order to accurately assess your margins and quickly identify levers for improvement.
How much margin do you need to be profitable?
Understanding your ideal margin is essential to adjusting your pricing and maintaining sustainable profitability. By regularly monitoring your margins, you can anticipate potential losses and optimize your bottom line.
Turn quotes into billable time instantly as soon as they’ve been validated, and integrate them directly into your schedules. This automation simplifies the process and saves valuable time for every team member.
Monitor the performance of your projects in real time, so you can see whether you’re selling at a loss or a profit as soon as the quote is generated. Whether you bill on a fixed-price or time-and-materials basis, you can renegotiate with customers or activate progress billing to better manage your cash flow.
Introducing the right management tools can transform your agency’s day-to-day operations, by simplifying operations and providing a clear view of the metrics essential for effective management.
Better productivity management means centralizing information, enabling precise monitoring of the time allocated to each task, and optimizing resources in real time. This approach guarantees better time allocation and improves your agency’s overall profitability.
The experience of the Pop for You agency (part of the Humanskills group – over 400 employees), has shown that the introduction and use of a tailor-made solution has improved its efficiency and profitability.
The first step to running a profitable agency is underway: you’ve mastered the effective nuances of introducing precise, concise, and efficient tools and processes.
Refine your billable time ratio: billable services are indispensable for profitability!
Optimize your profitability by refining the billable time ratio: aim for between 70% and 80% billable time to ensure sustained profitability. When non-billable activities like marketing or accounting accumulate, they can eat into your profits. Precise and real-time tracking of this ratio helps you quickly adjust the balance between billable and non-billable tasks.
If your utilization rate falls below 70%, this often means an overload of non-billable tasks. In this case, it’s crucial to readjust your operations to increase the proportion of billables, either by increasing sales, or by reducing internal projects that absorb too many resources.
Conversely, a rate of over 80% may indicate good profitability, but also a possible underestimation of costs or under-investment in developing key areas of your agency.
Ensure that each team member works on tasks that maximize added value for your business. A detailed analysis by skill can reveal inefficiencies, such as developers spending too much time on support rather than active development.
By adjusting these ratios, you can significantly improve your overall profitability.
Ultimately, maintaining a clear and continuous view of your billable versus non-billable services is essential to quickly identify areas for improvement and adjust your business strategy accordingly.
An indispensable communion between production and sales force
Aligning production and the sales force is crucial to maximize your agency’s profitability. Once the management of billable services is mastered, ensuring perfect coordination between staffing rates and sales becomes simpler with the right tools.
Time allocation plays a crucial role, but keeping a close eye on your staffing rate to maximize your teams’ occupancy and stimulate the sales force is just as important for profitability. It’s essential to maintain a sales pipeline aligned with the overall agency schedule so that production capacities and commercial prospecting needs are clearly visible.
Anticipating staffing is critical; knowing in advance whether to hire external skills or use internal resources can greatly influence your profitability. Perfect harmony between the sales force, production capacity, and staffing is key.
A successful synchronization not only meets client expectations, as you will be able to adhere more rigorously to project deadlines, but also optimizes the use of all your resources, allowing you to increase sales and plan necessary recruitments, thereby directly enhancing your profitability.
Managing your cash flow to perfection
Many agencies only have visibility of 1 to 2 weeks on their schedule, risking their financial agility and ability to invest confidently.
Anticipating your Working Capital Requirement (WCR) flows is crucial to successfully navigating through financial challenges, enabling you to finance projects, reinvest and maintain operations without fear for your company’s financial future.
To master this management, it is essential to forecast and adjust your production capacity in real time, maintain commercial responsiveness, and continuously analyze data with smart and predictive tools. This includes tracking gross margins and WIP (Work in Progress).
By centralizing your company’s data on a single platform, you benefit from accurate and realistic monitoring, simplifying working capital management. Effective management of these elements ensures the financial health of your agency, supporting its growth and the peace of mind of your teams in managing projects.
In this context, the use of a suitable management tool becomes essential, not only to simplify day-to-day operations, but also to ensure the sustainable growth of your business.
Furious: the essential co-pilot for profitability-driven leaders
Furious is the essential co-pilot for managers committed to sustainable profitability. You can automate most of your processes, from transferring signed quotes into your schedule to automatic invoice follow-ups, eliminating repetitive tasks.
With Furious, you have real-time access to the information you need to optimize your agency’s management, thanks to a platform featuring over 200 business widgets. Our intuitive interface facilitates project management for both simple structures and multi-agency setups.
Ask yourself the right questions: Is each of my projects profitable, including pre-sales? Is my staffing adapted to profitably meet demand? Are my sales processes sufficient to support our growth?
Already adopted by thousands of clients, including agencies, IT service companies, consulting firms, engineering companies, and SMEs, Furious replaces an average of seven traditional tools and reduces administrative management time by 20%.
Ready for takeoff? Test Furious for free right now by requesting your demo!
