Blog: April 2010

The long-term competitiveness of any company will depend on its ability to effectively define and deliver upon its core competencies. Core competencies should provide significant contribution to the value of the products or services offered and must be difficult for competitors to imitate.

What does this mean to you?

As an agency, it means that your time should be spent managing creative and providing (preferably billable) value to your clients, and not on administration or cumbersome project management. You don’t want to have a team of employees spending an undue amount of time on non-billable system or admin work, and shouldn’t have to think about the “behind the scenes” components of running your business. Profitability is of the utmost importance, and this is where fp comes in.

Allow us to focus on our core competency of understanding the business behind the creative industry. You will come to think of us as an extended member of your team at a very small fraction of the cost. We’re here to help ensure the information you need is available for you real-time, and that you understand which clients are profitable and which ones aren’t. We’re always here to help your team out, suggest best practice workflows, and work on options that will ensure that you’re doing what you do best.

Your focus needs to reside on your core competencies of delivering the best designs and best campaigns for your clients. fp is here to help you do this, while at the same time providing you with the ability to maximize your profitability.

Tate Lillies
VP – Business Operations.

Labels: ad agency software, core competencies, profitability, project management

A lot of Function Point clients track time against work that they have not yet gained. This can be very valuable. Tracking the time it takes to create your proposals and conduct sales meetings with prospects will give you a better view into the profitability of your work. Those large projects with large price tags can be very tempting, but they may not be worth going after if the prospecting process is overly labor intensive. Some of our clients have told us that they were committing too many resources in going after the large, glamorous projects but were not aware of how much it was costing them until they started tracking their prospecting initiatives. For some of our larger clients, this is not as big of a problem. But for our smaller agency clients, every penny counts. Tracking the time it takes to gain your work will allow you to make better decisions in the future. It's important to be specific in your timesheets as well. Once you have a better understanding of where the time is going in the proposal process, you will be able to become more efficient.

One way that some Function Point clients have cut down own their proposal and prospecting time is by creating a portfolio of estimate templates. Having a few templates for each type of work you do will significantly cut down on the time it takes to get proposals and estimates out to prospects. Furthermore, having a high, medium, and low cost template for each job type will help you to see where you can stretch your dollars with each of your clients. Copying old estimates for jobs that were profitable is also a great option, especially if you're using the actual time and expense values to create your new estimate (just one click with Function Point).

Here at Function Point, we're in the business of helping our clients to become more efficient and profitable. But we do seriously admire the awesome creative that our clients produce. We understand that while it's important to make strategic decisions when bidding for work, sometimes profitability takes a back seat to a happy client and an awesome new piece of creative to add to the portfolio (just don't tell my boss I said that).

Marc Wilson - Account Manager

Labels: job tracking, proposal, time tracking