How 2 Fish Company, LLC Decreased Time Spent on Billing by 80% with Workamajig

2 Fish Company, LLC is an award-winning creative marketing agency. By serving up miraculously creative marketing solutions, they help B2B and B2C marketing teams make waves.

quick HIGHLIGHTS

CHALLENGES

• Spending hundreds of hours on duplicate data entry due to a lack of integration
• Managing multiple separate software solutions—not time or cost-effective
• Introducing major accuracy errors with a Band-Aid work management solution

SOLUTION

• Project Management: track conversations, manage files, review change requests, monitor budgets, and more
• Agency Management: streamline end-to-end workflows with systems that talk to each other from first inquiry to the final invoice
• Finance & KPIs: assess profitability, guide hiring, and automate invoicing
• Built-in Dashboards: help every role operate efficiently and simplify time tracking
• Integrated Data: fit everything together into comprehensive reports

RESULTS

• 80% more efficient billing cycles (20 hours > 4 hours)
• At-a-glance insight into client profitability helps forecast future growth decisions
• Financial visibility tied directly to projects gives a clearer view of LTV

CHALLENGE:

Growing company needed more time and cost effective project management solutions.

In its infancy, 2 Fish Company, LLC, found itself ‘hitting walls’ when it came to end-to-end project management. As Scott Millen, Managing Partner, and Creative Principal, explains:

“We had great customer service, but we kept hitting walls in terms of software capabilities. We needed an end-to-end solution that would help us with financials, sales, and prospecting. That’s what we liked about Workamajig.”

Before Workamajig, 2 Fish Co. had cobbled together a solution from different software services. They had separate tools for managing invoicing, estimating, financials, and project workflows.

But as 2 Fish Co. continued to grow, the solution became untenable. Relying on multiple pieces of software that didn’t speak to each other meant spending hundreds of hours on duplicate data entry.

“As we were growing, we needed a more cost-effective way to do things. We needed to simplify the inputs and unify our information as much as possible,” Scott says.

2 Fish Co. soon whittled its software reliance down to two solutions: Quickbooks for financials, and a project management solution that promised complete integration with Quickbooks. But it wasn’t long before Scott realized that they’d just swapped one problem for another…

 “When we started looking at financial reports, project profitability, and billable hours, we noticed significant errors being generated. In some reports, the programmers rounded numbers but in other reports, they didn’t. It was wildly inconsistent,” he explains.

The solution that was meant to be saving time was instead generating extra work. Most vexing of all: the software provider didn’t even realize there was an issue until 2 Fish Co. discovered it.

  “We were spending hundreds of man-hours to essentially debug software for a vendor. It took up resources and we couldn’t depend on our data anymore. When you’re a small shop that bills hourly or on a per-project basis, you don’t have time to waste on that,” he says.

Scott began looking into other solutions. He wanted one platform that made end-to-end project management easy so that he could focus on helping clients, and increasing project profitability.

  “After exhaustive research, we ended up with Workamajig.”

“We had great customer service, but we kept hitting walls in terms of software capabilities. We needed an end-to-end solution that would help us with finances, sales, and prospecting. That’s what we liked about Workamajig.”

Solution:

ALL-IN-ONE SOLUTION FOR PROJECT MANAGEMENT, RESOURCE MANAGEMENT, FINANCIALS, SALES, AND MORE

As owner and creative principal, Scott needed complete visibility into each project’s life cycle. He wanted a holistic view that showed how time tracking and entry impacted projects and how project workflows intersected with financials.

Workamajig delivers that holistic view. As a single platform for project management, resource management, time tracking, accounting, financials, sales, and CRM, Workamajig gives Scott all the flexibility and functionality he needs.

“We track the full client journey—prospect to proposal conversion, projects and estimating, and time tracking for that whole life cycle. Workamajig helps drive behavior; it’s valuable to know how much money we spent on acquisition versus how long it took to make that money back,” Scott explains.

Scott loves that Workamajig’s intuitive reporting enables him to divide the information up granularly or gain a 30,000-foot view of company profitability, depending on what he needs.

“Getting granular gives us a sense of what we’re good at and what we spend the most time on. It helps us point our services in the right direction. But what’s really valuable is seeing that even if you’re profitable on a per-project basis, you’re actually losing money year-over-year on certain client relationships. That has helped us identify behaviors that prevent us from being profitable,” Scott explains.

With Workamajig, he can even scout ahead and preemptively solve potentially unprofitable situations before they happen.

“Imagine a prospective client describes what they want to accomplish. We define the scope of the project and plug it into Workamajig to know if we’re going to be profitable or not. If not, I can quickly pivot and present a new scenario that will be more mutually beneficial,” Scott says.

But Scott’s favorite thing about Workamajig is the way every piece of it works together like a well-oiled machine. Though he loves Workamajig’s project management capabilities, he says the beauty of the platform is the ability to tie project information with prospecting and accounting data, to see how everything is related.

“We can build estimates on a prospective basis. Then, with the click of a button, we can convert those into live jobs. So we go from speculation to production instantly. The whole journey is tracked.

Within production, I can see how much it will cost us to run that project. I have instant visibility into project profitability. Plus, I can give my clients access to their own projects, so they see project schedules and can interact with us. At the end of the project, I can see how smooth it went or how profitable it was,” Scott says.

“We track the full client journey—prospect to proposal conversion, projects and estimating, and time tracking for that whole life cycle. Workamajig helps drive behavior; it’s valuable to know how much money we spent on acquisition versus how long it took to make that money back.”

Results:

LESS TIME IN SPREADSHEETS, MORE TIME MAKING MONEY

Looking at how difficult project management used to be with multiple disparate software services versus how easy it is today, Scott can only describe Workamajig as a “game changer”:

“With the click of a button, I now know exactly how profitable a client or project is. We used to have all these different systems that forced us to spend tons of time—hundreds of hours—manually merging data and plugging it into spreadsheets to figure it out.”

For Scott and his team, Workamajig translates to hours of savings every single day. Those hours translate directly into cost-savings—tedious data entry tasks can now be wholly invested into client work that actually makes the company money.

“Workamajig is saving us tons of hours. Our twice-a-month billing cycle used to take multiple people a combined 20 hours of work. This last cycle, it took four hours… not because we don’t have as many clients, but because we’re getting more efficient,” he says.

“As for me, personally... look, I’m a creative guy. I don’t want to spend hours doing math,” Scott laughs. “The joy of Workamajig is that I get to efficiently manage my day without spending all of my time in spreadsheets. I have all of my projects laid out and prioritized and I know exactly how much time I need to spend on each. That’s amazing.”

For 2 Fish Co. as a whole, Workamajig has helped future-proof project profitability. At-a-glance insights and holistic reports paint a vivid picture of where the company is losing money, enabling Scott and other leadership members to build more accurate growth plans.

“Because you’re tracking everything, it’s easy to generate a year-end report to see what was profitable and what wasn’t, and then build a forecast for the coming year,” Scott says.

But as great as the platform is, the one thing Scott says puts this platform head-and-shoulders above the rest is its outstanding support. If he ever needs help, Workamajig’s knowledgeable team is always ready and willing to lend a hand

  “Workamajig is customized to you and its support is great. Love those folks. My rep is the best,” he says.

“The joy of Workamajig is that I get to efficiently
manage my day without spending all of my time in
spreadsheets. I have all of my projects laid out
and prioritized and I know exactly how much time I
need to spend on each. That’s amazing.”