85% of your profitability depends on time management. Yet this key resource is all too often underestimated. Many managers are aware of this, but too few adopt a truly effective strategy for steering their business in the right direction. Discover in this article the 4 essential levers that will enable you to optimize your projects, meet your deadlines, improve the organization of your teams, and increase the profitability of your agency.
The challenges of time management
Overcoming internal resistance
Implementing a time tracking system can reveal cultural resistance: nobody likes to feel watched. Your employees may fear being reduced to mere executors. However, it’s by explaining to them that this will enable them to avoid long days – such as saying “yes” to a customer request at 5pm on a Thursday – that you’ll win their support. By analyzing time spent, you can also identify training needs. What’s more, with a clear view of schedules, everyone can move forward without the need for constant coordination.
Mastering the emotional aspect
You’ve probably been in this situation before: accepting unpaid extensions from a long-standing customer, or spending 80% of a project’s budget on pre-sales to land a major advertiser. To avoid these pitfalls, it’s crucial to accurately measure the loss of time and resources. This awareness will enable you to make more strategic choices and boost your agency’s profitability.
Capturing the right metrics
For a time measurement process to be effective, it’s crucial to collect the right data. Too often, each team uses its own tools or methods, which complicates the overall analysis. Putting an end to the proliferation of tools that you only use to 10% or 20% of their potential, and paying for unnecessary licenses, will enable you to centralize data, optimize costs and simplify processes.
Sounds complicated? Not to worry. Furious has synthesized the lessons learned by thousands of agencies into 4 essential keys to mastering time management and turning it into a real lever of profitability for your agency.
The 4 levers to exploit
Lever #1: Measure profitability directly
Does your agency make money on every project? Every minute and every resource must be optimized. An instant, transparent view of your finances enables you to adjust your strategies in real time.
To help you better visualize the profitability of your projects, here’s a simple formula that sums up the key equation:
This formula will enable you to quickly calculate the profitability of each project, taking into account time sold, average daily costs and purchases resold.
If you’re still using spreadsheets, these tools can quickly become limited as your team grows. It’s time to switch to specialized solutions that automate the transformation of quotations into sold times, integrated directly into the planning schedule. This will simplify data entry and optimize the allocation of your most precious resources: your staff’s time.
With these tools, you can easily monitor progress, invoicing and the quality of deliverables in real time. You’ll be able to adjust your projects, renegotiate if necessary, and activate progress billing to better manage your cash flow. In short, a tailor-made management solution will enable you to anticipate, simplify and optimize your processes in just a few clicks, while improving the efficiency of your teams.
— The case of Pop for you
Before adopting Furious in 2021, the agency found it difficult to accurately estimate the time spent on each project, which directly affected profitability. Thanks to Furious, this problem has been solved, enabling better time estimation and more accurate tracking. The result: a saving of 5 hours per week and improved staffing thanks to early resource planning.
Caroline Vignand-Olivier - Associate Director Pop For You Agency - Humanskills Group
Thanks to Furious, we have transformed our project management. Nous sommes passés d’un pilotage à vue à une stratégie anticipative qui nous a permis de gagner 5 heures par semaine, d’améliorer notre staffing et d’optimiser notre rentabilité. It's a complete game-changer for Pop For You.
Today, Pop For You – a 15-strong team supported by the 500 experts of the Humanskills group – takes full advantage of Furious’s planning and sales pipeline management to maintain sustainable profitability.
Lever #2: Fine-tune your sales time ratio
— The impact of non-billable operations
If you neglect non-billable operations (marketing, accounting, back office), your profitability suffers. The ideal goal is to maintain a ratio of 70-80% billable time to guarantee sustainable profitability.
— The two possible scenarios
- Your utilization rate is below 70%: You’re facing an overload of non-billable tasks. You need to either increase sales or reduce the load on internal projects to maximize productive time.
- Your utilization rate is well over 80%: This may signal a good level of profitability, but could also indicate a lack of traceability of non-billable tasks or under-investment in growth (pre-sales, central functions). This scenario could also mean that you’re not selling your services at a high enough price.
— Maximize profitability with the right mix
Are your talents devoting their time to tasks with high added value for your agency? For example, does your best art director focus on billable projects, or is he absorbed by ancillary tasks such as support? Similarly, are your developers busier with (non-billable) support than developing the site or features?
It’s crucial to be able to distinguish how much time each team spends on pre-sales, internal marketing or billing. A real-time analysis of your billable vs. non-billable services will enable you to identify areas of waste and adjust your strategies accordingly.
— Analyze billable potential by skill
Our tip: measure billable time by skill type.
At Furious, we met an agency with 60 employees, including 6 developers.
Their problem? Their billable time ratio was far too low to ensure sustainable profitability. By analyzing the billable time objectives of each employee, we discovered that the developers were spending 80% of their time on billable projects, but the rest on non-billable support.
The solution was simple: hire an employee dedicated to 100% support. This enabled 100% of the developers’ time to be reallocated to billable projects, leading to a +100% increase in their billable potential, more projects completed, and significantly improved profitability.
Similarly, if your project managers have a billable potential of only 50%, it’s time to ask yourself some questions. Are you selling enough of their services? Ideally, their billing rate should be between 80% and 100% to ensure your agency’s profitability.
Lever #3: Optimize billable vs. non-billable time
Once you’ve mastered the management of billable services, staffing rate management becomes much simpler – provided you’re well equipped. Time allocation remains essential, but to maximize profitability, it’s just as crucial to correctly measure your staffing rate and anticipate needs. Having a sales pipeline synchronized with the agency’s schedule is essential. This enables you to anticipate effectively whether you need to hire in-house or call on external resources, and thus optimize your costs.
Lever #4: Manage your cash flow
Controlling WCR (Working Capital Requirement) is essential to your agency’s financial survival. Many agencies lack medium-term visibility, planning only 1 or 2 weeks in advance, which limits their agility and capacity to invest. The key lies in harmonizing sales force, production and staffing. Successful synchronization not only ensures customer satisfaction – you meet project deadlines on time, and can even launch outbids based on identified needs – but also optimizes the use of your resources – everyone is kept fully occupied, and you can launch outbids if necessary, as well as any recruitment – thus contributing directly to increasing your profitability.
Alexandre Vernier - Founder of ODW Agency
Adopting Furious at ODW was a strategic decision allowing us to manage our working capital with unprecedented precision. It transformed uncertainties into clear opportunities, propelling our company towards sustainable success.
Anticipating cash flow is therefore the last piece of the puzzle in guaranteeing sustainable profitability. To do this, it’s crucial to be able to adjust production in real time, maintain commercial responsiveness, and rely on predictive tools that will help you adjust your margins and avoid FNP (Unpaid Invoice) build-ups.
By aggregating all company data on a single platform – not just financial data – you can guarantee financial monitoring that’s as close to reality as possible. This is what ODW has done with Furious, enabling them to manage their WCR with unprecedented precision, and turn uncertainties into opportunities.
Furious, the co-pilot for profitable managers
As a true co-pilot of the biggest French-speaking agencies (Ceetadel, Adveris, HulaHoop…), we know how to turn time management into a key lever for boosting your margins.
With Furious, you can :
- Automate: from quotation management to automatic invoice reminders.
- Visualize in real time: keep your key indicators up to date with just a few clicks.
- Customize your views: with over 200 business widgets.
- Simplify project management: with an intuitive interface for all your collaborators, whether you’re a single or multi-agency entity.
Furious also enables you to ensure that each project is profitable (whether you work on a fixed-price or time-and-material basis) by controlling all the critical aspects of your business.
Already adopted by thousands of agencies, Furious replaces an average of 7 tools, saving you up to 20% on administrative tasks.
Ready to take the plunge?
Request your free demo and test Furious today!
