In a nutshell
- Dazzling growth: from 0 to over 50 employees in 4 years.
- Annual growth of 50%, recruiting 22 people a year.
- Collaboration with companies from 10 to 100 employees (90% of new customers are acquired by word-of-mouth).
- Furious has enabled rapid expansion to be managed effectively, while maintaining a high level of service.
- Sustained growth thanks to optimized management via Furious.
Défis initiaux & objectifs
Faced with rapid growth, from 0 to 55 employees in four years, SMASH Group felt the need to optimize its time management and centralize its tools to maintain the quality of service offered to its customers, while anticipating time overruns and therefore potential needs for additional staffing to be activated flexibly.
Their main objective
- Improve team visibility and time management to avoid overwork and optimize profitability.
Their secondary objectives
- Better planning
- Provide customers with concrete metrics on time spent on projects.
Who are they?
- Consulting firm, shared functions (HR, Legal, Finance)
- France – Paris / Marseille
- Founded in 2018
- 55 employees (+22 employees per year)
Results with Furious
— Clear visibility
Staffing, scheduling, time spent per customer in 2 clicks.
— 1 unique tool
To manage projects and employee availability (from 0 to 50 employees in 4 years) as well as sales/margin management
— A view of essential KPIs
Dynamic, with the ability to monitor and secure data
Before Furious
Prior to the integration of Furious, SMASH relied mainly on Excel files to track working hours and manage administrative tasks. Although practical, this method was seriously lacking in dynamism, and didn’t provide a real-time view of team workloads. The result was a general inefficiency in project management and a lack of flexibility that was sorely felt, especially in a context of strong growth. Jean-Baptiste, co-founder of SMASH, tells us:
We've gone from the medieval to the digital era. With the arrival of Furious, we've moved into a much more dynamic era, with monitoring and, of course, data security.
SMASH had clear objectives: to anticipate, plan and staff better, to reduce team stress due to work overload, and to ensure that every minute worked was correctly tracked and allocated to optimize profitability.
Management also wanted to ensure that the teams themselves could see and plan their future workloads (one of the keys to avoiding unpleasant surprises and delays).
After Furious
The integration of Furious has solved several problems at SMASH.
Real-time tracking
This functionality was crucial for SMASH, which wanted to ensure that its teams were not overwhelmed, to be able to anticipate potential recruitments even before new customers were signed, and to plan their tasks optimally. Jean-Baptiste states:
Jean-Baptiste Cousin, co-founder of SMASH
We monitor the time thanks to Furious very precisely, firstly to make sure we're not overloading them and putting them in stressful situations.
Planning and task allocation
In addition to real-time monitoring, detailed schedules by team and project have been set up. Thanks to these shared schedules and the automatic reminders configured for certain actions (task reminders, invoicing, vacation periods, etc.), task distribution and the anticipation of periods of heavy workload have been greatly improved.
There's nothing worse than not knowing how you're going to work, or what you're going to work on in the future. So it's also a question of planning.
2-click tracking and easy management control
SMASH Group’s management was facing a persistent problem of lack of visibility over what was really happening within the teams, especially with the team’s rapid growth. This problem was solved with the introduction of Furious.
With Furious, it has become possible to track team performance and workloads in just a few clicks, enabling more precise and efficient management. Management can now see in real time how projects are progressing, which teams are overloaded and where adjustments are needed, facilitating rapid, informed decision-making.
Jean-Baptiste's 3 favorite killing features
Feature #1: Project progress
My first favorite feature is the little widget to move the cursor around, allowing you to declare your time in a rather fun way with a macro view of all your projects.
This feature makes time tracking simple and engaging for teams, improving adoption and usage of the tool and, in turn, providing greater visibility into project profitability. Here’s proof in the image:
- Here: the progress of projects on Furious.
This widget allows users to easily and quickly report time spent on projects—more specifically, the progress of each project—providing a clear and intuitive overview for each one. Are you behind schedule? Do you need to initiate billing? Add sold time? Automatic alerts can also be configured.
Feature #2: Team Schedules
The second feature I really appreciate is the overall macro view of the box, specifically the team schedules. This gives you a macro view of how many days have been staffed, how much vacation time has been taken, and more.
- Above: team schedules on Furious
This global view of schedules allows for efficient human resource management and better anticipation of staffing needs. Team schedules facilitate task distribution and project organization, ensuring that workloads are balanced and objectives are achieved in a coordinated manner.
Feature #3: Individual Time Tracking
There’s a third feature I really like called individual time tracking. It allows you to see a sort of economic reality once invoiced, showing how much of the total available time was billed and how much was not billed.
- Above: individual time tracking on Furious
This feature allows for precise tracking of each employee’s time usage, comparing billed time to total available time and detecting discrepancies. It helps identify inefficiencies and optimize billing, ensuring that employees’ time is used profitably.
Results achieved
The impact of Furious on SMASH was immediate and significant. The company noticed a notable improvement in tracking time spent on projects and was able to better anticipate the recruitment of staff based on peak periods or the onboarding of new clients. Jean-Baptiste explains:
Switching to Furious was a no-brainer. It was both to save us time trying to understand what was happening with the teams and to give the teams visibility into their workload.
Finally, on the team side, it’s a complete success—despite some initial “frictions” during the tool’s implementation. They benefit from increased predictability of their workload, allowing them to better organize their week and avoid delays.
With this solution, SMASH has transformed its time management, moving from manual and static tracking to dynamic and proactive management. This transformation has reduced errors and delays in projects, thereby improving client satisfaction and team well-being.
Training & Support
To ensure the successful adoption of the tool, we went all out! First, we organized dynamic training sessions to showcase all the features and benefits of our tool. And that’s not all! We provide ongoing technical support to quickly resolve any issues that may arise.
But it doesn’t stop there. We maintain regular contact with SMASH to ensure everything runs smoothly and to incorporate their feedback. After all, it’s through their feedback that we can continue to improve our tool and make it even more effective.
Furious & SMASH : Better Sales Tracking
Augustin Marcotte, co-founder of SMASH
Today, thanks to Furious, we can effectively track our leads, converted leads, prospects in the pipeline, and the time taken to convert prospects. This has allowed us to improve and analyze why we lost certain leads and understand our performance better.
