Here at bcToolkit we are always pleased when our customers have a “Light-Bulb” moment. Using bcToolkit as a Basecamp Reporting Tool, often one of the first reports that a customer runs is analysing where time is spent throughout their business. The report is sometimes a big shock and has a profound effect on their business model from then on. That’s their Light Bulb moment because this report stimulates a different way of thinking and leads to further analysis of time in the business.
Here is a real example of how one such customer analysed their time.
This analysis exposes some big issues that the customer immediately set about addressing:-
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The customer only billed 25% of all time available, this was a surprise.
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24% of time, an amount almost equivalent to total sales, was spent on marketing if you view it from a billable time perspective.
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The company was investing 18% of its available time in trying to get new business. If you equate this to the billable time % then this eludes to a very poor sales conversion ratio.
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With 21% of time spent in management and admin, the company was spending more than a 5th of time available in meetings and on administrative tasks.
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The only saving grace was the R&D % which they were pleased with although just slightly higher than they imagined.
So what did our customer reslove to do? Firstly they set a budget for what they called “dead” time, which to them was the management and admin category. Whilst this time is important and valuable they understood that there was no way that any of it could be re-sold so they had to streamline their management processes significantly to free up time to be used elsewhere. A budget here was set at 10% for Management/admin. Marketing was fixed at 12% and the customer was happy to keep R&D at 12%. Further analysis uncovered that 8% of the new business time was time that had been spent pitching ideas to clients that were not accepted. The company decided to be smarter at understanding their client’s needs and be more efficient in this area. They invented consultancy products where this creative and speculative time might be paid for by client’s becuase they saw it as a valuable part of strategy developemnt. This all meant that there was now 54% of time left available to bill to clients. The new target split of their time became:-
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R&D – 12%
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New Business development – 10%
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Marketing – 12%
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Management/Admin – 10%
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Available billable time – 56%
With our customers permission, we shall keep you posted as to how they perform . You can see that if they manage to bill 56% then they will have doubled their turnover! Basecamp from 37signals is a good place to start for an online project management or online collaboration tool. And if you want a Basecamp Reporting Tool then look no further than bcToolkit to unlock business-changing information from your Basecamp data.
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