Business or Frankenstein? How Commerce Kitchen Streamlined their Operations

A business is a monster of many parts. We all know how it goes - clients are the heart, projects are the big brain and your team is the muscle that moves it all.

While you try your best to keep all of these parts together, the tools most of us use can pull us (and our business) further apart. After you’ve bought subscriptions to 4 or 5 different services, you might start to realize that you’ve assembled a hideous nightmare.

This is the story of Commerce Kitchen, a Denver-based web development agency, and how they realized they were building a Frankenstein. “It was a dark few years of management,” director Leslie James tells us.

“We tried six different systems - Basecamp, Workamajig, Active Collab, Capsule, Zendesk and Pipedrive.” The key thing here was that there were too many systems to keep track of, and while some were better than others at their narrow tasks, managing the business actually got harder - outweighing the benefits the cocktail of individual tools provided.

Not built to fit their agency workflow

Commerce Kitchen’s team of 16 “superheroes” work with clients of all sizes, from two-man shops to $500MM+ giants like Transwest and HBO. “We needed an integrated sales and project management system that was simple to use and could track time/budgets across both projects and retainers,” Leslie says. “We also needed to be able to rollover costs on retainers from month-to-month.”

And why wouldn’t they? Studies from SPI Research has shown that having an integrated sales and project management system brings 23% more billable revenue to professional services businesses. Not to mention the harder to measure pain of long nights chasing spreadsheets to do billing or forecast future workloads and revenue.

Not only did Commerce Kitchen have a full plate of client work, but their clients, work and team were split across multiple, scattered applications. “When you have four different platforms, it’s inherently difficult to rollover time, making the entire process time-consuming rather than time-eliminating.”

Smoothing out the joints

In just a few short months, Leslie James and her team implemented Accelo. It came to be their one-stop shop for their client services, giving them the features they needed and more.

Clients are the heart of business and Accelo made sure that Commerce Kitchen never missed a beat. With automatic email tracking, they could find all of their client communications in one place, whether they were in Gmail or on their phones.

Leslie adds, “it streamlined internal communication—we’ve eliminated some internal meetings because we can all check in real-time to read the latest communications with the clients.”

Getting some much needed R&R -- Retainers & Rollover

Because of Accelo’s flexible Contracts & Retainers Module, Commerce Kitchen were finally able to track their ongoing marketing services. “We can ‘bank’ money as necessary to execute more comprehensive marketing campaigns,” Leslie explains.

Flexibility is key here. Being able to choose the duration of their renewal periods and allotted time/budgets has helped them to generate a more fluid process overall.

With Accelo, the team at Commerce Kitchen have found one place to manage their small (but growing!) business.

Commerce Kitchen consults with clients to find the best platform, architect the best user experience and develop the best internet marketing strategy to help them do better on the web.