Web design and development agency 3 Media Web vastly improved operations, reduced overhead and increased productivity through Accelo.
When your business focuses on clients, it’s easy to fall into the trap of putting all your energy into them, thinking they’re all that matters.
Marc Avila and Lysa Miller of web design and development agency 3 Media Web learned that paying closer attention to operational red flags from the get-go and making it a priority to address inefficiencies drastically improved their business.
Marc, CEO and Founder, and Lysa, President and Co-Founder, were seasoned owners of successful agencies when they joined forces in 2015 to offer their clients digital experiences built on UX principles. Their collective history taught them how critical it is to prioritize foundational business processes in addition to quality client relationships.
"There came a point when we had to decide what our main point of focus would be," Marc explains. "We knew that if we didn't have operations to support our business, we would probably fail."
Marc first attempted to piece together a client work management system using several manual platforms.
"All project management tasks were done with Excel sheets," he explains. "Invoicing was done with different software, and time tracking was monitored elsewhere.”
The lack of accurate employee utilization and project budget insights made it clear that 3 Media Web needed a single, powerful platform to track key metrics.
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"Before Accelo, we didn't really know how much time we were spending with every client — or how much money we were losing," Marc recalls. "If a client bought a 24-hour support agreement, we were often doing a lot more work for them. In the end, we were likely spending 36 hours of support, but we weren't tracking that properly. We didn't have the capabilities to report on that very easily, so we were just giving away our services for nothing."
In 2014, Marc discovered Accelo and knew the platform could address his agency’s biggest pain points. 3 Media Web’s entire team, from project managers to support specialists to social media creators, welcomed the visibility of a centralized source of information.
After a successful implementation, they hit the ground running with Accelo as their end-to-end solution, dramatically increasing revenue and time tracking while minimizing the chaos that tends to characterize periods of rapid growth.
The ability to see what’s happening across the company at any given moment gave Marc and his leadership team peace of mind.
“We're now able to monitor, act on and make decisions based on our team's Accelo usage," he points out.
3 Media Web’s numbers speak volumes about what they’ve been able to achieve.
Since the business started managing client work with Accelo in 2014, it has reduced overhead by $156,000 and saved over 8,000 hours. Marc and his team dedicated the time they saved to growth strategy, allowing them to acquire another agency.
"Accelo has definitely paid for itself. Just the increase in fixing some of the pricing problems with our retainers — that alone pays for it. It's paid for itself many times over."
They’ve noticed a big shift in less tangible — but similarly meaningful — outcomes, too.
Marc offers a compelling example: "Accelo has allowed us to communicate more with our clients so that we have a better relationship with them," he says. "Now, when we're doing retainers, we're emailing them, talking to them and helping our clients understand how much time they’re using and how much they should be using."
With Accelo's help, 3 Media Web's trajectory has tracked up and to the right, and our partnership is still going strong.
Learn more about how Accelo adds value for agencies.
