
Why I quit my fancy job and built software to replace myself.
I have a philosophy about my personal role in businesses — if I am successful, I will have made my role obsolete. This might seem counter-intuitive as a success metric, but it is my primary focus: creating agency operations and processes that support business growth and scale.
Here’s a story. I was looking at Quora recently and found the following question or variation, “can someone recommend good project/task management software for an agency that won’t break the bank? Would be great if it could do time and resources too? Not Basecamp.”
I’m the human you hire to solve issues like this because our industry toolset is lacking, to be honest. The reality is, when I do my job well, after a while you don’t need me anymore because you have a system that gives you the visibility and insights for strategic decision making you once relied on me to do. You love me, and you keep me because I provide experience, charm, and do a mean new business pitch. But let’s face it — with a good tool some might consider a “me” overkill.
Back to that problem that needs solving.
There are some interesting items to unpack in the above question. The biggest item — you’re not looking for project management software, you’re looking for businessmanagement software. That difference is huge and something I too often see confused inside of agencies.
So what is the difference between business management and project/task management software?
First, let’s start with the idea of Management. Management is about containment. This is nothing new, but without it, chaos will reign inside your agency. What agencies usually do, is implement a process to manage that chaos. For a dramatic metaphor consider chaos a virus: if you do not manage the containment and control of that virus, it will spread and create a pandemic that will destroy all things.
Management is not about preparing for the pandemic in advance, it only about keeping the virus from spreading.
Your business needs more than management. It requires predictions and foresight.
Project/Task Management tools only help you manage the present. For an agency to grow, forecasting and future awareness are critical. Management tools like Basecamp (which I’m not crapping on at all) are meant to let you know what you need to be doing in the immediate — but they can’t tell you what happens six months from now.
When you’re looking for a “project management” solution ask yourself: “Am I looking for something to keep my projects running smoothly, or am I looking for something to keep my agency running smoothly?
This confusion is common and apparent in the world of available toolsets. When I work with groups seeking to grow and mature it’s one of the first distinctions I work to clarify. I spent decades working at organizations looking for “project management” software when they needed a complete tool set to forecast and prepare the business. When I looked through Quora I was taken aback that: one — no one has solved this problem; two — the confusion still lingers.
I did what any marginally insane person would do — I quit my really good job that enabled me to wear incredible footwear and decided to build the tool (right? who wouldn’t risk their entire career to build software? <nervous laughter ha ha>).
Introducing Glass Factory
In less fabulous shoes, I, and my other co-founder, spent the last few years building Glass Factory.
Glass Factory is a core platform for people powered companies in the services space; the HAL of your business, connecting to your current tools and becoming the center for information. Now you can grow and manage your service business without having to hire someone fancy and expensive like me, completing my ultimate business goal of making myself obsolete. (Not totally obsolete, I’m still an awesome choice for growth consulting and have great footwear :) ).
Okay. You have got the right tool. And then what happens?
When I work with agencies, specifically around management and operations, I usually throw out two mantras that leads of any sort should remember:
- You’re never done
- Always ask “and then what happens?”
If your tools can’t answer what happens next, odds are you don’t know what’s happening now.
Here’s an example:
Company: Wow! Things are great, everyone is busy and happy, our work is fabulous, and we’re getting more RFPs, we’re making more revenue than we’ve ever seen this quarter!
Me: That’s great! And then what happens next quarter?
Company: I think we could be good, we could probably stand to win more work.
NO! “Could” and “probably” are not actionable answers. You should know if all your work dries up next quarter. Or if your team is upselling so well that your pipeline shows you booked through the next five months and you have to hire if you want to support new revenue. Your tool set is impotent if you can’t confidently say something like:
Company: Wow! Things are great, everyone is busy and happy, our work is fabulous, and we’re getting more RFPs, we’re making more revenue than we’ve ever seen this quarter!
Me: That’s great! And then what happens next quarter?
Company: According to our pipeline probability we will likely close three more large projects that will run while our current work is still ongoing. We’re starting to pipeline candidates now in case we need to hire quickly to support the work. We’ll also be trimming the outbound outreach and focusing more internal account growth to maximize, based on expected utilization and capacity.
That’s better. That’s what I should hear from you.
Bottom line? Project Management tools can’t answer “and then what happens?”. Business management tools like Glass Factory can.
A few more things.
When sourcing operations tools, the key requirement should be “will it tell me what happens next?” The business needs to be able to see into the future and predict peaks and valleys to prepare for them. The business also needs to be able to quickly see how the entire agency can be optimized. Say, for instance, finding that your lowest margin resources are often utilized more than your higher margin folks. If that’s a thing for you, it’s time to change your rates — or evaluate whether your team is focused too hard on selling low margin work. To gain that insight you need a few pieces of data that can work together:
- Plans
- Resources
- Timesheets
- Billing/Revenue
When you look for agency level tools, you want something that will manage and aggregate those data points. With those four points “and then what happens?” becomes built in. Designed to work in concert, those data points will give you the visibility you need over the whole of the business. Project plans are the foundation for all of this, but plans can’t operate alone. That’s why Project Management software often lacks the capability of full agency management.
Nuance is the bread and butter of agency life, and one of the key reasons our toolsets have to be predictive.
If you can’t see the iceberg until you hit it, what’s the point?
Solid agency software can support plans, resources, and revenue harmoniously to provide a practical crystal ball. These three items must be inextricably bound to support solid forecasting across the agency. This means your resource pools are bound to your plans, so you’re able to move and change schedules, and your system will make sure everything downstream is updated in real time. If your $1MM project gets put on hold half way through, a simple plan update should alert the system — so you’ll knowthat team will be temporarily saddled with idle time and your revenue will drop and needs to be replaced. That only happens if all the data lives in the same world.
I co-created Glass Factory, so it starts with fully integrated plans, resources, and revenue to solve this issue. The result is a dynamic system that helps you prepare in advance automagically. Not quite magic, but some amazing programming.
Flexibility is non-negotiable.
When looking for a tool set, take an earnest look at how the software is going to fit into your workflow. A lot of the tools out there, especially based on project management first, force fits you into the workflow designed by the product. You are not looking for something that you have to spend an endless amount of time creating workarounds for because it can’t handle something as basic as “Tom is going on PTO, and I want to backfill him with Jerry but just until Tom returns.” Or, my personal favorite “Our system doesn’t understand fixed fee or retainers, so I guess I’ll export stuff and just do the math myself?”
Our industry thrives on flexibility — tools that can’t flex are not solutions.
A good tool, for example, supports when you need to work with a client who wants a retainer and variable team, plus all the repercussions for supporting that on the resource and revenue side. All of that is part of forecasting, and with good forecasting, it’s effortless to be flexible.
Sorry, There is no Magic Bullet.
It’s another common misconception that once you find a system, the tool itself will solve the problem.
At the risk of short selling my own work in this area, I can say confidently no onesolution will plug in and BAM you’re off! Even the costly enterprise solutions that will run you $250K a year in licenses and then additional “implementation” support are not going to solve every single issue.
Regardless of the tools you go with, you need to have a process and workflow that will support predictive oversight. This means training your company to always think about constructing frameworks that address “and then what happens?”. Tools and systems are a means of streamlining and speeding up the process — they cannot be the process themselves.
That said, a great tool that can support the data points, and can fit or flex to meet your working needs is out there, Scully. The key is not looking for a tool that defines how you work but looking for a tool that will support how you work.
Obligatory plug. Go!
If you are currently in the process of investigating tool sets or revamping your process, I encourage you to check out Glass Factory. I am here for demos (https://calendly.com/alison-grippo), and we offer an excellent free trial (https://www.glassfactory.io/).
Most critically, if you’re at the stage in your growth where you are defining your process and finding a need for tools like these, remember always to ask “and then what happens?” If you can start there, you’ll find you may not need a “me.”
About Alison:
Hello! I am Alison Grippo, a 20-year agency veteran who has helped with process and operations for scaling and growing agencies. I have worked with HUGE, Razorfish, Conde Nast, HAVAS and many others. Recently I co-founded Glass Factory (www.glassfactory.io) — the core operational platform to support growth and scale for service businesses. If you’re looking to grow or just improve your current offering and process, I would love to chat:alison.grippo@glassfactory.io Special thanks to Kendra Jones the bad ass writer and creative talent maven who gave her wisdom to this piece.
