Efficient resource management is key to driving an agency’s profitability.
| 1 in 4 agencies need visibility of all their operational information in one place. |
Lack of visibility is a significant problem. Operational visibility emerges as the primary challenge for industry leaders. Optimizing profitability starts with internal visibility of projects and resources. Lack of visibility in this aspect can lead to underutilization of resources and a decrease in profitability.
Visibility is essential for effective time and resource management.
In the marketing and advertising agency sector, creativity and strategies are fundamental, but equally critical is internal management to be efficient and profitable. Transparent management means having complete visibility of operations, which helps avoid time deviations and accurately estimate the hours dedicated to each project.
The first step to stop seeing visibility as a problem and transform it into a benefit is to have all project information laid out in one place, allowing for advance planning.
The Need to Centralize Information: The Importance of Visibility
Most problems are related to internal visibility (resource visibility, deviation visibility, deliverable visibility, rework visibility, operational capacity visibility). If I don’t know my team’s operational capacity, I don’t know what I have available to sell.
This highlights the need for agencies to have a clear and transparent understanding of their daily operations to make informed and effective decisions.
More than 25% of creative agencies highlight the need to have all their operational information centralized in one place. This not only facilitates daily management but also improves long-term strategic decision-making. One of the main advantages of having a management tool is the total visibility it provides over your projects. In today’s environment, where efficiency is key to success, having a complete and accessible overview of all operations is indispensable.
COR offers a clear and detailed view of how much time is spent on each specific task and how many human resources are involved in each project phase. This level of detail is crucial for optimizing the use of time and talents within the agency. Unfortunately, more than 50% of agencies do not accurately know their team’s actual capacity. This lack of information can lead to inefficient task allocation, where some team members are overloaded while others are not fully occupied.
With management software like COR, you can know exactly how much time and effort is dedicated to each project, allowing you to manage your resources more effectively and efficiently. Having a detailed view of each aspect of the project enables you to quickly identify any areas needing adjustment, whether it’s redistributing tasks, adjusting deadlines, or reallocating resources. This detailed knowledge not only helps improve operational efficiency but also allows agencies to anticipate problems before they become major obstacles.
Additionally, this complete visibility allows team leaders to have a better understanding of internal dynamics and workflow. By knowing exactly where time and resources are invested, it’s possible to make real-time adjustments to improve productivity and ensure projects stay within budget and are delivered on time. It also facilitates the identification of bottlenecks and the implementation of quick and effective solutions to keep work moving.
Operational Efficiency: Tracking Time and Deviations
| Most agencies estimate that between 15% and 40% of their team’s time is spent on rework. |
The industry is experiencing a structural problem in its business models, suggesting critical improvement areas in project management and alignment with client expectations.
The lack of tracking changes in each project can lead to operational inefficiencies and potential revenue loss. Change requests are one of the main reasons a project’s budget can be affected.
70% of agencies rarely renegotiate their project budgets with clients. A significant percentage of respondents claim to renegotiate budgets occasionally. This highlights a potential area for improvement for many agencies, which should leverage internal data to improve negotiations. Negotiating and renegotiating fees is an art in itself. The key is to make informed decisions based on precise data rather than assumptions.
The deviation between estimated and actual time is the main challenge for agencies, affecting profitability and overloading the team. Transparency in project management allows identifying the causes of deviations and facilitates fee renegotiation.
Correctly detecting time deviations dedicated to rework or extra requests in projects allows you to increase profitability and maintain a transparent relationship with clients when renegotiating fees. Each time there’s a change in this aspect, the established budget may become outdated, and the profit margin may not be as initially agreed.
It’s important to make periodic adjustments to the scope of work and not wait for a long period to take corrective actions. Along with clear and open communication, periodic reviews of the scope of work are key: Budgets are adjusted periodically, reviewing the hours and resources used, and enabling concrete data tracking of fees, instead of waiting to charge for something that happened a year ago.
42% lack visibility over the hours dedicated to clients versus internal matters, which can impact profitability and resource management. These can include training, meetings, or other non-billable activities. Recognizing how many hours these are can be beneficial for the team’s operational efficiency. To make a creative agency profitable, these indicators must be addressed: the goal is to have more hours available to sell with the same number of team members.
Small improvements in internal efficiency can significantly impact your financial results.
To determine if a project is profitable, we must understand how it was quoted. The key is to know how many resources are available and how many hours are necessary for the project to be completed. These hours are what we call billable hours. When accurately calculated, we can correctly measure a project’s profitability.
Efficiency is not just a term; it’s the key to increasing your agency’s profitability.
The Importance of Having a Management Tool
| Only 23% use capacity planning tools. |
To overcome the challenges discussed earlier, it is essential to adopt innovative solutions that allow for process automation, precise measurement of worked and billed hours, and optimization of resource management.
Having the right resource management tool can significantly transform the efficiency and productivity of any project or organization. This tool reduces idle time for teams by optimizing billable hours and offers real-time visibility into task progress. Additionally, it improves organization and increases productivity by intuitively and collaboratively managing daily priority changes. It automates the logging of hours worked on projects and enables the visualization and organization of tasks in team members’ schedules, ensuring a clear understanding of daily availability. It also facilitates the distribution of estimated task hours across different days and includes filters to enrich the user experience, thereby improving visibility and control over the team’s workload.
COR’s ability to provide this comprehensive and detailed view makes it an indispensable tool for any creative agency looking to improve efficiency and profitability. It helps keep everything organized and in one place and provides the necessary tools to make informed and strategic decisions that can transform your operations. With COR, project management becomes a transparent and manageable process, ensuring that each project not only meets its goals but does so efficiently and profitably.
Maximizing revenue is a constant concern for more than 40% of agencies. COR facilitates this process by providing accurate data on the time and resources invested, allowing agencies to charge fairer and more realistic fees. Additionally, the tool helps track the progress and status of each project, quickly identifying any necessary rework, whether internal or from the client. This not only saves time but also reduces additional costs.
Transparency and credibility are other crucial aspects that COR effectively addresses. Project information visibility provides greater confidence and credibility for negotiating fairer fees. Clients can see progress and understand the value of the work done, making it easier to justify the fees. Moreover, COR helps maintain strict control over project deadlines and priorities, ensuring that deadlines are met and high-quality work is delivered on time.
Precise Data and Strategic Decisions
It is crucial to adopt tools that provide visibility and enable real-time tracking of projects, resources, and deviations. This, in turn, equips agencies with the ability to renegotiate fees, adjust the scope of work, and ensure more stable and profitable relationships with clients.
In the world of agencies, anticipating the availability of your resources and managing their time efficiently is fundamental, especially in sectors such as marketing, advertising, and professional services where time is a critical asset. Service-based companies focus on the labor capacity of their resources (industries selling hours).
Having a tool that allows for capacity planning, predicting resource availability to meet anticipated demand, is key. This means evaluating and planning the available capacity of human resources at a skill/team level within a company to meet future project demands. It’s a balance between supply (team capacity) and demand (project needs) that enables organizations to maximize efficiency and productivity.
Conclusion
When ideas and creativity flow without proper management, it’s easy to get lost in daily tasks and not maximize the potential of each project. This is where COR comes into play, the management software designed to optimize team efficiency and boost profitability.
COR not only organizes and plans your projects but also helps you execute them more efficiently. With COR, agencies can improve their performance and profitability by optimizing resource management and team efficiency. Additionally, it allows you to renegotiate fees with clients and maximize billable hours, ensuring every minute of work translates into revenue.
COR is more than just a project management tool; it’s a comprehensive solution that helps creative agencies work smarter. By organizing, planning, and executing projects efficiently, COR enables agencies to enhance their performance and profitability. If you’re looking to maximize billable hours, negotiate fairer fees, and manage your team more effectively, COR is the tool you need.
Don’t wait any longer. Implement COR in your agency and start seeing how it improves your business!
