Renowned digital agency in the recruitment space implements Accelo to improve workflows and processes, enabling the company to maintain their elite global position and support expansion.

Background

Acclaimed digital agency Attrax held a strong position within the recruitment industry and was faced with the opportunity for greater global expansion. The agency’s international popularity was growing and demand increasing, but the agency team was struggling when it came to organization, utilization and visualization.

Like many agencies, Attrax relied on several different tools to manage their clients and projects, hindering the ability to work collaboratively and efficiently. Sifting through long-winded email threads and managing everything through inboxes wasn’t cutting it anymore. The team continuously struggled to find the information they needed, connect with the right people and organize projects — their multi-tool environment made it unrealistic. Knowing what people were actually working on was complicated, too, and tracking utilization was impossible.

“We had no way of knowing how many projects we were doing, who we were doing them for or how long it was taking us," explained CEO James Saunders. "Because of the volume of projects, we were not able to spend as much time on the high-value projects as we desired.”

Naturally, the quality of work began to suffer, and without the necessary visibility into client projects, it was hard for leadership to know where to invest. It became clear that to retain their elite position within a niche market, they needed to make efficiencies a priority. So began Attrax’s mission to find a solution that empowered and connected everyone on their team.

Challenges

Having a global workforce housed in offices around the world meant that it was crucial to collaboration and connectivity that everyone worked in the same system. Given that the volume of client work was increasing, all agency employees needed to be able to find client information quickly without having to search through disorganized email threads or jump between task tracking, project management or a myriad of other tools. The team needed automated time tracking to accurately record and monitor employees' workload and billable hours.

Attrax looked at various business management tools but couldn’t find a solution that allowed them to seamlessly organize all of their client work in one place — until they found Accelo.

Solution

Accelo enabled the Attrax team to have all of the most important information up to date and in one place, with the entire team using a single system for all stages of client work.

“I didn’t think it was possible to have this kind of company-wide transparency and collaboration. I love Accelo’s Stream. It’s made the entire team more connected,” James said. “It gives us a much quicker turnaround.”

Automated time tracking helped the team capture time spent in meetings and on client emails, eliminating the need for manual entry and accurately reflecting billable time. It allowed leadership to see how many billable hours were being utilized and where they could be more efficient with a distributed team. As James puts it, “Now we always know exactly where everything is, and where all the problems are."

Accelo not only helped the Attrax team work better together, but provided valuable business insights to assist leadership in making informed, strategic decisions that paid off.

Results

Attrax’s billable hours have increased by 10% each week since adopting Accelo, due in large part to the power of automation and time tracking. This is work that the team was already doing but was lost due to time leakage. Every dollar finally started hitting the bottom line, boosting net margins to around 25%.

Attrax has also been able to cut costs due to increased efficiency.

When we didn’t have Accelo, all we had were threads and threads of emails, so often, we would have over five or six threads of emails about the same project — we were wasting so much time. With Accelo, we have a central location for everyone to communicate and collaborate, to work out the timeline, content, design or copy issues together.
James Saunders, CEO

In a growing business, winning more accounts without the need to hire more employees greatly increases profitability. With a 15% increase in efficiency and the ability to take on more projects with the same amount of staff, Attrax was given the opportunity to boost profit margins by another 7–8% (considering labor costs represent 50-60% of a business's cost). Their revenue boost and efficiency savings together can drive profit margins up over 30% — double the industry average.

What could your margins look like with Accelo? Learn about the platform's value for agencies.