Profound Strategy is a modern SEO agency that partners with B2B and technology companies to deliver consistent and meaningful organic traffic growth. SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization, increases the visibility of a website to search engines and grows online traffic. Profound Strategy has 20 employees in the United States, who have all been using Tempo Timesheets since the company started out with Jira several years ago.
Without time tracking software, it’s difficult to accurately estimate what amount of time will be allocated to each client or project. It’s a challenge to predict how long it will take to answer a question, create a report or produce a deliverable. For Profound Strategy, that problem was easily addressed with Tempo.
“Tempo really built the foundation for us to know how long it’s going to take to deliver top-quality work to clients, so that ultimately they’re getting a consistent experience from us,” CEO Nate Dame explained.
Before Tempo, Profound Strategy struggled for years to track their true costs in delivering to clients. It was difficult to create efficient internal processes for managing contracts. For cost management, the company initially used Tempo Budgets, but found the scope of the tool was larger than needed, so that many of the advanced features went unused. They have used the simplified Cost Tracker for over half a year now - even before the product was released in January 2020, they were beta users. It’s perfect for smaller companies to get a handle on their spending and has proven very useful to Profound Strategy.
What Cost Tracker does is to easily convert Tempo Timesheets data into an estimate of true project costs. Tempo Timesheets and Cost Tracker made it easy for the team at Profound Strategy to measure the time and cost involved in delivering their work, so that excess hours weren’t being spent on certain clients or projects and so that flat-rate deliverables could be accurately priced. By using these tools, each client gets what they are expecting. Dame emphasizes the importance of being able to measure profitability and know the cost of what is being sold.
“It’s important for any agency to know the cost of their contracts and not sell work based on hunches and guesses,” Dame said. “Our product would be no good if we didn’t know what it cost to deliver.”
The team at Profound Strategy are currently tracking 13 projects in Cost Tracker. Every project is defined by a client’s contract term of six months. With an easy overview, users can get a convenient visual of how the total cost (labor plus expenses) are tracking towards the budget that was set.
“When you first look at the overview, you see this great visual from the start to the end of your time frame and the line you want to stay beneath or at,” said Sabrina Hill-Davis, Project Coordinator at Profound Strategy and a Cost Tracker super user. “I think it’s a really great visual representation. Syncing the scope is also really gratifying, just pushing that button and seeing everything come together. It definitely allows us to have a day-to-day, real-time visual of what we’re doing.”
One of the other benefits of Cost Tracker is how conveniently it integrates with Tempo Timesheets and, by extension, Jira.
“Cost Tracker saves me a ton of time personally working in project management, because I don’t have to create a spreadsheet for a budget or use another tool outside of Jira - it’s seamless,” said Mallory Peters, Project Coordinator at Profound Strategy and also a Cost Tracker super-user. “For me, the ease of use is huge.”
Ultimately, what matters to Profound Strategy is delivering the very best value to clients, which can only be done with consistent, effective internal processes. Without detailed and accurate time tracking, contract pricing and project management were inefficient, which created an added burden on the team as they strove to continue delivering consistent, top-quality results. With Cost Tracker, they can now quickly and easily address any financial imbalances and focus on delivering the best possible experience for all their clients, with an easy-to-use and seamless cost management integration.
