Ongoing Projects for Increased Profitability

While many agencies start out chasing one-off projects, the best operators know the secret to long term success is to work strategically with their best clients on ongoing projects. The benefits are clear - more predictable revenue, the ability to unlock long term value for your client, and even the ability to lock in your services as part of their business processes.

What is an Ongoing Project?

Projects that run over multiple quarters, which highlights the need for an adaptive project management tool equipped with Retainers. Unfortunately, though, most of the tools and applications used to run agencies today are focused on delivering one-off projects, leaving your most important clients and work exposed, prone to error, over-servicing and under-charging.

That’s why Bang! Online Marketing turned to Accelo and its unique contracts and retainers module to implement their Lifetime Customer Model which has both increased the quality of their client service and boosted profitability.

Working With a Lifetime Customer Model

Bang! Online Marketing Agency offers a range of online marketing services including SEO, SEM, social media marketing, email marketing, mobile sites, and creative design.

The way Bang Online works with clients is by first identifying their key challenges and key objectives. They then propose a mix of services to achieve those objectives, working on a traditional project approach for the first month’s implementation and then transitioning to ongoing services start from two months in and onward.

Approximately 60% of their customers are subscribed to ongoing services on a monthly basis, and normally work with them for a minimum of 12 months. “We know their businesses through and through, and have a solid relationship with these customers,” says Managing Director Renae Lunjevich. “The ability to seamlessly transition from a project implementation phase into an ongoing service phase with the same client using the same tools, framework & billing has helped us turn this good theory into a reality”.

Getting Hands-Free with Automation

The way Bang Online operates means that they have a lot of clients who pay a monthly management fee for their online marketing services. As such, they needed the right functionality to record time spent per month and per contract.

Bang implemented Accelo in 2012 and have come to rely on the unique contracts and retainers, solving their monthly service needs. As part of what they wanted in a system, Retainers allowed them to do the following:

Roll time over each month

Create recurring template tasks

Choose the number of hours for each period and approve time at the end of each month

Add issues, emails, meetings and more activities to a retainer

Auto-generate invoices

Accelo allowed them track all of the work linked to their retainer clients. The hours logged, emails sent, projects finished and meetings scheduled are all brought into one basket at the end of the billing period. Anything that is billable becomes charged at a fixed hourly rate and all of the staff at Bang Online Marketing complete their monthly billing with ease.

Making Up For Lost Time

If you were a taxi driver, you wouldn’t give away free rides to customers going a short distance.

Unfortunately, most service businesses do just this because it is too much hassle to manually keep track of meetings, reports, calls and email support when you’re in between big projects. While sometimes this work is just part of maintaining a client relationship, there are often some clients that take up more time than others. These meetings and emails, small as they might be, add up fast - just 10 emails each week of back and forth with a client costs you over 5 days of billable time each year!

At the end of every month, Bang Online takes a look at their monthly client report and sees how much time went into servicing a client. Project Manager Jon Ogden tell us, “occasionally, we have some clients who require additional reporting or meetings”.

“We use automated timesheets in Accelo and can see where we overspent our time and most importantly if it was beneficial to the client. If it was a benefit, we can use this information to suggest an increase in management hours to compensate for additional time spent on meetings or reports.”

This feature alone has increased profitability for the company in the long-term. From a time-management and business efficiency point-of-view, they have seen massive benefits in terms of improving their servicing abilities and ultimately, their ROI since implementing an automated platform.

Ongoing projects are the key to long term success with clients & it's never been easier with modern CRM systems. If you’d like to learn more about how to get started with retainer and contract automation for your business, sign up for a free trial of Accelo today!

Bang! Online Marketing is an online marketing agency based in Perth, Australia. They provide a range of marketing services to develop their clients’ online presence.