Design Business – FP in Attendance at APDF Exchange for Design Firms

Are you a current client, or are you looking for a workflow management solution for your design firm? If you are, you may be interested in the partnership between Function Point and the Association of Professional Design Firms (APDF).

The APDF and FP have been working for over a year helping with the re-design of their Online Financial Performance Survey. We have also been given the opportunity to invite our clients to take part for no cost (this is generally a benefit for APDF members) so let us know if you’re interested!

The survey provides specific benchmarks and goal setting parameters for design firm management not found in any other survey including: Pricing Ratios, Salary Comparisons, Balance Sheet information, and Profit and Loss statements.

Each of these provides a valuable benchmark against which small to medium sized design firms can gauge their business’s performance against the industry. Very cool stuff if you’re looking to increase your profitability, efficiency and billability (and really, who isn’t?). Key financial indicators are available for the following disciplines:

• Product Design and Innovation
• Brand Strategy / Communications Design
• Digital / Interactive Design
• Experience / Environmental Design

The information is further broken down into firm sizes of 1 – 15, 16 – 40, and 41 or more. These disciplines and firm sized match FP’s target market and expertise. Our creative agency workflow management software has been designed to give creative firms like yours the traffic management capabilities required to increase profitability, and the survey is an amazing tool that can be used to ensure that your agency is keeping up with the industry.

I had the opportunity to attend the APDF Exchange in San Francisco last week to officially launch the survey tool and talk a bit about Function Point. What a great opportunity, not only to visit a beautiful city, present and attend some great business management sessions, but also to meet face-to-face with a number of our clients. Barbour Design, Dossier Creative and Altitude are a few of the APDF member clients that I met, and a number of other design agencies approached me to chat about our system and what FP could do to help them. It was great to chat with everyone and receive feedback both about our system and team over a glass of wine!

Function Point is much more than just a time, task and job management system, we pride ourselves in our relationships with our clients. The entire FP team understands the business of design, and spend much of our time consulting with our clients and working on creating better ways of doing things, and increasing firm profitability. The APDF and FP will be working together for years to come helping design firms such as yours run your business more effectively and profitably, and I hope to attend future events such as Exchange.

This article was contributed by former Function Point employee, Tate Lillies.