Why Small Advertising and Creative Agencies Need Some Process

Even the smallest creative agency can benefit by adding a standardized workflow, pricing and time-tracking process to its everyday way of doing business. Not only will it enable the creative firm to save money by increasing resource efficiencies, it will help the entire team understand how the business is doing and increase creative staff focus on billable work.

“To have a fast, smooth agency workflow, agencies need a specific system to open jobs, build creative briefs, create estimates and timelines, organize daily efforts, post workers’ time to projects, issue purchase orders to vendors, record miscellaneous expenses, and create invoices.” (Second Wind)

Too often I hear smaller agencies tell me that they don’t have a standard hourly rate, that they don’t task out elements of work and don’t really have any idea how long something will and should take. Running a profitable business means that agency management should understand exactly how long a job took and how profitable it was. Agencies should also track time on pitches and proposals that they didn’t get … there’s nothing worse than submitting proposals over and over again to a prospect only to realize that you’ve spent hundreds of hours on work that didn’t turn into any billable time.

Plan your work, track your time and analyze where you are most profitable. Doing this will help ensure that you focus on where your agency will make the most money

Given the economic variables of working with smaller agencies and the lack of budget to rely on third party consultants, process is often the first thing that is forgotten – after all, there is work to do, pitches to make and invoices to get out. This is where software as a service (SaaS) and comes in – not only is there no capital (IT) expendature required, it comes with a relatively low monthly cost. At Function Point, we pride ourselves at providing much more than just software, and have developed expertise in the creative industries allowing us to help our clients with their unique agency workflows. We effectively become a business process partner of our client agencies and serve as both business consultants and IT experts. We want you to be as profitable as possible!