Loose PDF quotes, hours not allocated to projects and no profitability data: at year end they discovered their biggest clients were the least profitable.
Sales pipeline with online quotes, hours allocated to projects from the time clock and a financial dashboard by project and by client.
The problem: working hard without knowing who for
Estudio Creativo Ría is a design and communication agency of 11 people working for brands across Galicia. Projects went well and clients came back, but at year end the profit and loss never matched the volume of work.
The diagnosis was invisible because there was no data: quotes were made in PDF and emailed with no follow-up, nobody recorded hours per project, and the feeling that "this client is eating us alive" could not be proven with numbers.
"We worked enormously hard and earned little, and we did not know why. Everyone had a theory, but none of them with data", says Susana, the studio's administrator.
The solution: from the quote to profitability, everything measured
The studio rolled out Fustibus at the start of the year. The sales pipeline tidied up the opportunities: every proposal has its status, its online quote (which the client accepts with one click) and its probability. Accepted quotes become a project and an invoice without rewriting anything.
The key piece was hour allocation: the team clocks in and splits their day across projects from their phones, in under a minute a day. With each project's hours and expenses, the financial dashboard shows the real margin per project and per client.
Three months in came the first surprise: their biggest client, the one that billed the most, was the least profitable in the studio. The endless revisions were not being charged for.
A year later: +22% margin with the same clients
With the data in hand, the studio renegotiated rates, defined the scope of revisions and learnt to quote using the real hours of previous projects. The result: 22% more margin in a year, with practically the same client base.
"The best part is that the awkward conversations with clients stopped being opinions. They are numbers, and numbers are easier to negotiate", Susana concludes.