In this session, we delve into the science of time management and the art maximizing employee productivity within boutique professional service firms. From strategic time management techniques to fostering a culture of efficiency, we explore actionable strategies to ensure every hour counts. Discover how to optimize resources, streamline processes, and empower employees to thrive, ultimately driving success for both individuals and the organization as a whole.
TRANSCRIPT
Greg Alexander [00:00:15] Hey, everybody, this is Greg Alexander. Welcome to the Pro Search podcast, brought to you by collective 54. On this episode, we’re going to talk about time management and time management in the context of employee productivity inside of a boutique professional services firm. And I got a special guest with us today is a member of collective 54. His name is Ben Edwards, and Ben is with a software company called Cmap that specializes in this very thing. So Ben, welcome to the show. Please introduce yourself to the audience.
Benjamin Edwards [00:00:48] Hey, thank you very much for having me, Greg. And hello everybody. At C 54. It’s Greg said I’m Ben Edwards, I’m the VP of partnerships here at C Matt and I’ve got a dual role. I get to lead our go to market efforts with boutique consulting in North America and also run all of our partnership opportunities, including being in C 54.
Greg Alexander [00:01:10] That. But. We hear from members all the time. Is their time starved? I don’t have enough time to do this? I don’t have enough time to do that. And yet, on the same token, you know, when we look at the benchmarking data, the margins are sometimes where we would want them to be. And then the services business, our inventory is the hour, the billable hour, if you will. So from your perspective, what do you think kind of the basics of time management are in this in the context of what we’re talking about today?
Benjamin Edwards [00:01:42] Well, you’re absolutely right to address that. But professional services firms people are both the biggest cost and source of revenue. Yet we still find a surprising number of businesses not tracking time. Maybe part of that is down to the fact they use a time tracking point solution, and adoption from the top down and to employee level isn’t particularly strong because there’s a perception that it’s a little bit big Brother Ray. Maybe it’s being used by the execs in the firm to sort of monitor. Performance where it isn’t necessarily the case actually like you address. There’s some benchmarking data in North America and didn’t hear me. I’d suggest those firms that keep a tight hold on time management are more likely to have stronger gross margin, better utilization rates, and be in the growth cohort.
Greg Alexander [00:02:38] Yeah. So when you’re working with clients of yours to implement time tracking, first off, what is the kind of trigger event that gets them to finally do it. And then when they go to implement it, what are the 2 or 3 things, the obstacles that are standing in the way? What you know, what can we learn from the previous implementations to help our members avoid some common mistakes?
Benjamin Edwards [00:03:07] Yeah, I think typically they would start to look at time tracking actually, after they’ve used a time tracking point solution on its own and not seeing a huge amount of value from it, unless obviously they do purely chain and work, in which case it directly links to billing. But within C 54 you talk a lot about growth and scale and product ization and being able to repeat business. And presumably that’s fixed fee type engagements. So they come to us because they want to join the time keeping data point alongside financial information, project management information, combinations of pipeline and live engagements. So they feel they’ve realized that actually from a maturity perspective and a sort of growth scale and exit perspective, it’s imperative to connect all of those dots together in terms of some of the challenges that we see with it. The first thing to sort of point out is probably adoption. And actually, this is probably where the most interesting element is quasi 54 members, because you’re a consultancy and part of your skill set is. Delivering value to your clients and how you propose things to people is really important. It’s the same with your employees. How you position it inside your organization is going to be absolutely imperative to the adoption. If I may, I’ll give you a couple of examples. So I guess the starting point is firms who can tie in with KPIs. And that then might lead to a stronger margin, which you can then suggest your employees means that they can have greater growth opportunities inside that firm. They’re going to be part of an organization that’s growing and scaling. And if you want to take that even further, you can even incentivize it to a certain degree, i.e. profit sharing. The other angle from a selling it in perspective to employees that can overcome that adoption hurdle is making it about them. So utilization is a really key metric for any professional services firm. But often employees look at that and think that’s something not going to be judged by, you know, which can be true to a certain extent. But actually if you’re implementing time management, it can be really beneficial to the employee because you can track non billable time, which is how much time have they invested in learning and development. How much time are they doing spending on IP creation or progressing their own career. And you can track that. You can also make sure that people don’t get double booked. People don’t experience, so over being being over resourced onto engagements and then at risk of burnout. So it’s a lot of value that you can give to your employees when you’re actually implementing a solution like this. It really is about how you sell it. The second most important thing to making sure that actually it’s a successful initiative is connecting and with all the other key components of running your operation. So. Analyzing the information to make sure that it’s aligned with your product ization strategy. Tying it into the project financials so that you can make sure there’s no scope creep or delivery and it stays on time, stays on budget. And then you can reinvest that. Hopefully that’s useful.
Greg Alexander [00:06:31] Yeah. Those are a couple of good, gotchas to watch out for. I particularly like how you sell it, and I think that makes a lot of sense. And showing how it’s to the benefit of the employee to do this. You know, for our listeners, you know, if you think about the challenge, especially with project based consulting firms, the challenge when you have limited forward visibility is matching revenue and expenses. You know, they’re constantly in the situation where they were. They fill the lake, drain the lake, fill the lake, drain the lake, you know, and they’re in there at times. They’ve got, you know, too many people sitting on the beach, so to speak. And then other times you’re running hot at 120% utilization, and they can’t figure out which way is up. And time tracking is a solution to that because you can see where the inventory is going, where all the time is going. And this better allows you to match revenue and expenses and get away from the boom bust cycle associated with project based consulting firms. Now, at what point been in your opinion? Is it appropriate for a firm to kind of move off of a unsophisticated, manual, spreadsheet driven approach to, you know, using a software tool to make this happen?
Benjamin Edwards [00:07:44] Oh, really? We can split that down into two cohorts. There’s the first time founder an organization which typically adopts it later in the cycle, i.e. somewhere between 20 and 50 employees, depending on usually how much work they’ve got on and whether they can free up a resource to lead that type of project internally. And then there’s the second time founder, who knows absolutely that the operational guardrails that will lead to efficiencies right from the off. And they can embed practices from day one and they will adopt it sooner.
Greg Alexander [00:08:20] So the person that’s been there and done that tends to adopt it sooner because they’ve seen the error in their ways and they and they know the value of it. Absolutely. You know, you talked about these time tracking systems, connecting with the other systems inside of a firm. So let’s let’s have a conversation around that. So first how does a time tracking tool connect to a CRM.
Benjamin Edwards [00:08:42] Well, if it’s in a city like ours, an operations platform is part of the tech. So actually, it’s part of the solution that you’re you’re purchasing from a business like Sema. However, quite a few businesses, particularly in the North American market, have already got a CRM, namely Salesforce and HubSpot being the two. And in which case you just have an API based connection between your CRM and your PSC. It’s a two way connection, and that enables you to also do a number of things, so you can actually start resourcing and soft booking people onto pipeline opportunities. But. Okay. And that will help you avoid that boom bust scenario you talked about earlier because you got that forward looking visibility. Let’s talk about the banking finance system.
Greg Alexander [00:09:33] So how does a time tracking system like yours connect into the financial system?
Benjamin Edwards [00:09:38] For pure TNM based work, it’s imperative because what people record from a time sheet perspective goes on to the bill and sent to the client, and therefore that connects with your finance system. But I know in C 54 and we wholeheartedly agree moving away from that towards more fixed fee, including performance based, remuneration is still imperative to have that financial connectivity because you want to make sure that as the project is ongoing, you’ve got visibility on where that time that’s been spent by your team tracks against that initial budget, so that actually you’re not going to experience the scope creep that is so common in professional services firms. And often it’s really well-meaning, over delivery. But actually, as an owner founder, if you can instill that sort of clarity and confidence from PMS to address those challenges head on, either with the client or delivery team. That’s that’s margin that you can reinvest in the business for whatever you need. Yeah.
Greg Alexander [00:10:45] The thing that I always got the most value out of was looking at. The financial information, which time is a component of at the individual product project level. Before the project was over. So a hypothetical example to illustrate my point. You know, let’s say that I’m in a six month project and it’s a fixed fee and the client is agreed to milestone based payments. So maybe they pay a third of the project at project kickoff, a third at the halfway point and the third at the end. It’s very common that we see this in the North American market. Well, in between those milestones, I’m trying to figure out, you know, am I going to turn a profit on this project or not? And that largely comes down to, you know, how accurate was my scoping when I submitted a proposal, and am I tracking to that original scope, or am I off scope quite a bit? And back when I had my boutique, it was very simple. We did a green, yellow, red, green was, you know, we’re on track. Yellow was, you know, we’re starting to see some problems, but it’s not a disaster. And red was, you know, what the heck happened? You know, we have massive scope creep. And if we don’t course correct, you know, early in the project we’re likely to lose money, which would then trigger us to go have a conversation with the client and point out point out the fact that, you know, they’re asking us to do things that weren’t originally scoped. You know, is that was that unique to my situation or it was is that a common use case and a common benefit that you see others realize?
Benjamin Edwards [00:12:16] Yeah, really come in. And the other one to add to that is having a view in your progress page website, connecting time at a project level against your invoicing so that you know, you can make sure that you’re not. Spending a huge amount of time on a client work that maybe hasn’t been fully invoiced yet, and you need to catch that up. Or the reverse is true where you’ve invoiced a hell of a lot upfront, but actually you haven’t spent a huge amount of delivery time on it, and therefore it’s going to catch you up at some point. So that’s another keenly viewed report in our system, I would say.
Greg Alexander [00:12:52] Yeah. And for those that aren’t familiar with that, whip is work in progress. So Project Whip is work in progress. That’s some, some industry slang there. I just wanted to clear up, you know, we we then collected $0.54. It’s professional services. Of course, you have the consulting shops and they get the term whip, but others like maybe, marketing agencies and architectural firms and things of that nature may not, may not understand that terminology, but we all should understand that terminology because it’s, it’s relevant across the segments.
Benjamin Edwards [00:13:21] Yeah, absolutely. So we service businesses across professional services. And what’s always interesting just to know is the differences in the overall strategy, but also the KPIs and the margins and the growth of boutique consultancies versus agencies versus AEC versus life sciences. And there are little intricacies and sort of common stumbling blocks that are pertinent to each of those different industries.
Greg Alexander [00:13:48] Yeah. We try to keep these podcast short to about 15 minutes, and we’re at the window right here. But then on behalf of the membership, we certainly appreciate you coming on and sharing your wisdom with us. We, we’re looking forward to the associated role model session, which, for those that are not members that are listening to this every week at inside of collective 54, we’ll have a Friday role model session, and Ben will be the featured role model. And one week. And that’s a private one hour Q&A session where members will be given an opportunity to ask their questions to Ben directly as it relates to and improving employee productivity through time tracking. So a couple of calls to action to the audience. So if you remember it, look for the meeting invitation for Ben’s upcoming weekly role model session and attend that so you can ask your questions directly. If you’re not a member and you think you might want to become one to learn from people like Ben, go to collective 54.com and fill out an application and we’ll get in contact with you. And if you’re not ready for either of those two things and just want to learn more, I point you to my book. It’s called The Boutique How to Start, scale and Sell a professional services Firm, and you can find that on Amazon. But Ben, it was good to see you. Look forward to your session on Friday. And thanks for being here.
Benjamin Edwards [00:14:57] Thanks, Greg. Look forward to it. And to bring you questions, bring you scenarios. We’ll try and.
Greg Alexander [00:15:03] All right. Sounds great okay. Thanks again everybody. Until next time I wish you the best of luck as you try to grow, scale and exit your firm.