85% of your agency’s profitability depends on the effective management of the time spent on your projects. Even though many leaders recognize its importance, 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.
Transform quotes into billable time instantly upon approvaland integrate them directly into your schedules. This automation simplifies the process and saves valuable time for each team member.
Monitor your project performance in real-time to see if you are selling at a loss or a profit from the moment the quote is generated. This gives you the opportunity to renegotiate with clients or activate progress billing to better manage your cash flow.
Introducing suitable management tools can transform your agency’s daily operations bysimplifying processes and providing a clear view of essential metrics for effective management. The experience of Pop for You agency (a subsidiary of the Humanskills group – with over 400 employees) demonstrated that introducing and using a customized solution 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%, it often indicates an overload of non-billable tasks. In this case, it is crucial to readjust your operations to increase the billable portion, either by boosting sales or reducing internal projects that absorb too many resources.
Conversely, a rate above 80% may indicate good profitability but also a possible underestimation of costs or underinvestment 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 closely monitoring your staffing rate to maximize team occupancy and stimulate the sales force is equally 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 the flows of your Working Capital Requirement (WCR) is crucial to successfully navigating financial challenges, allowing 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 precise and realistic monitoring, simplifying the management of WCR. 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, using a suitable management tool becomes indispensable, not only to simplify daily operations but also to ensure sustainable growth for your business.
Furious: the essential co-pilot for profitability-driven leaders
Furious is the indispensable co-pilot for leaders 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 gain real-time access to crucial information, allowing optimal management of your agency through a platform offering more than 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 now by requesting your demo!
