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As a strategic marketing firm our competitive advantage
stems from knowledge, so the most valuable resource that we
have is time.
Our specialty is turning research into strategies for your
business. We know that by examining the goals of your
business you can determine what information to track and
how, when to report on it, and when to act on it. The
trouble is when it came to managing our own internal
performance, we weren't doing this enough for ourselves.
So while we've always had a handle on our
hourly rates for ad hoc work, it became obvious early on
that our ongoing projects really drained our resources - we
just weren't being compensated well for our time.
How did this happen? For the first 12 months all our quotes
were being based on 'gut feel' for how many hours we thought
we needed to work complete a job. This is because we tracked all
our work using an excel spreadsheet. While this was fine for
gaining a general idea of how many hours had been spent on a
project, we never took the time to analyse the results
against income - the process was just too onerous and time
consuming.
We also never tracked our 'do not bill' time - the extra
bits and pieces such as office admin or value-add services
being performed for a client. So we weren't really considering
the whole picture as part of our quotes.
The Solution
BurntToast®
has been working with
Time &
Data Management since May 2008 - we assist in delivering
their email campaigns - so to build our "full picture" we
decided it was time to learn more about
Timeslips and how it could help to streamline our
business.
After discussing our needs with Michele, we implemented
Timeslips
in February of this year and immediately sought advice on
customisation. At the time of installation, Michele setup
our
Timeslips to capture billable, do not bill and no charge
time, enabling us to customise the database to best suit our
needs. She also customised our invoice templates to capture
the information we like to provide to our clients - and in
particular, built custom fields that allow us to
automatically display sponsorship monies raised as a
percentage of every invoice.
Customising our setup and adding
BurntToast®
branding took about four hours, and after tracking our day-to-day work for just over a month the
results are quite astonishing. Within a few short weeks our
biggest drain has already been identified - do not bill
time.
The Results
Since implementing
Timeslips we've learnt
that at least half of our
week is spent on general client admin - phone calls, client
emails, new business enquiries, meeting preparation and
broad market research. Because we've never tracked this before,
this part of our service has been missed in our 'gut feel'
calculations for quoting on a project and has therefore not
been
included in our billable hours. That's a big chunk of time not earning any income and something we are now
planning to change.
We know we've only scratched the surface of what this software
can do for our business but it's already paid for itself
thanks to customisation. The next step? Contract reviews!
For the first time since
BurntToast® started, we're actually looking
forward to this process. We now have confidence that what
we are quoting will compensate us correctly, improve our
profitability and ultimately benefit the most important
people of all - our clients. |
