And so this is Christmas… what have we done?

Over-service has become an all too familiar term across the design sector, where more work rarely coincides with an increase in revenue. In a service based industry it’s easy to go over and above on those key strategic accounts that drive revenue and worry about the wash up later… why not make a New Year’s resolution to take back control of your real-time outputs to negate these issues?

The ability to identify which accounts the metaphorical kitchen sink is being thrown at in real time and acting on it quickly, should be a vision for every agency in 2018. On the other end of the spectrum those accounts that need a little TLC should also be flagged before it’s too late. 

Knowledge to help you run your business efficiently requires real time information on how each job is tracking against the client estimate, real time information about resource requirements and whether jobs can be juggled to avoid additional freelance costs, real time retainer utilisation data, clear information on which jobs are in scope and which are not, real time information on which of your staff are performing and which are not, which accounts contribute and which don’t.

In our experience, agencies tend to see greater transparency of their business after big process reviews. These improvements, such as a systems upgrade, generally take time and effort to decide on but once implemented can save significant margin.

Leading agency, JKR Global’s account service staff used a myriad of complex Excel templates to prepare estimates before entering summarised data into their existing system, because it was easier. This led to a number of common problems:

• Summarised estimates made it impossible to identify areas of overrun
• No ability to provide detailed forecasts as data was not held centrally
• All job cost reporting was performed outside of the system, due to lack of data in the system
• Effort required to prepare accurate reports was significant and quickly out of date

Since the roll out of Pegasus at JKR Global, their FD Mike Khan has remarked at the range of agency process improvement the system has driven, leading to an increase in recoverability across many of the key metrics the DBA Annual Survey Report provides insight into, such as recovery rates of staff utilisation, rate card recovery and overhead management.

How many of the common problems detailed above do you encounter within your own business? If they seem all too familiar, then it’s time to take control. With another year over and a new one about to begin, be sure not to repeat the same mistakes of 2017 – instead empower your agency by gaining access to your data. With the right system in place let’s make the headache of using Excel and multiple other tools to prepare estimates, create revenue forecasts, allocate resources etc. a thing of the past. Once you’ve done this, your 2019 mantra will be ‘Profit is the power to do what you want’.