5 top tips on maximising efficiency

To work out where there may be room for improvement, you need to truly understand your ‘wastage’. By wastage here, we mean non-billable data.

Let's say you are expecting 80% billable and allowing for 20% nonbillable, how are your teams tracking on this?

If you don't have this data or time logged, you really need to start collecting it. This information is gold dust and will enable you to fully understand what is happening 'on the ground' and where there is room for improvement.

When thinking about efficiency and processes, you should always be planning for the future and asking yourself — when we grow, will what we do now still work?

Growth is one of the hardest things for an agency — or any business — to do successfully. To ensure that the quality of your output remains consistent, you must always be thinking one step ahead.

There will be things that you as an agency do really well. Understand these, keep doing them, but ensure they’re in place across the board and that they can be scaled when you double or triple in size.

They will tell you what is challenging and shed light on their pain points day-to-day. Collect this information and notice patterns in delays or errors on reports — accounting for a large proportion of admin time. This will drive you to make the change and also help to get buy-in from the team.

At Graphite, our teams are organised in a squad structure. These are non-hierarchical teams of both strategic and design experts that are curated with our clients in mind and function as an extension of their in-house team.

Working in this way has many positive implications in terms of efficiency. Being completely dedicated to one client improves service delivery and quality of output due to a deep understanding of a client's business and their own specific challenges. Putting automated processes, systems and streamlining tools in place — to suit both client and squad — eliminates unnecessary activities. Having fixed meetings and real-time collaborative documents helps with quick decision-making, whilst improving relations and communication flow.

Learn more about our squads and how they benefit our clients.

Look at what data is needed to operate or forecast better and how this is being presented currently. Time and time again, we’ve seen situations where teams are relying on endless spreadsheets owned by one or two people, and if this crucial person is on leave, things grind to a halt. Remove this situation by creating transparency within the business.

Examples include things such as profitability on client reports, utilisation, actual costs versus sold costs, pipeline versus existing utilisation. Find a system that pulls this all together in real-time or can be easily reviewed.

At Graphite we use Forecast to track our operations and profitability, and the Atlassian suite — including Jira, Confluence, Bamboo — to manage our projects, people and to implement processes on an agency-wide basis.

There are many tools on the market to create a great base for this, however, it's not just a tool that can solve these problems around efficiency. Other aspects that come into play include mindset, culture, training, process and reporting, which will also need to be regularly reviewed, adapted and refined.

You should invest in a tool that the team sees value in and that gives value back to the business. Keep it simple. Keep it a key focus in the business to get right. Keep adapting. And, most importantly, be sure to question the scalability of your approach. Will this still work if you double or triple in size tomorrow?