How The Think Tank is working smarter with Synergist

The problem

Lack of systems, clarity and insight

“As you grow, you think about scalability. You think about solutions that will give you clarity, help you establish best practices, and provide insight you can act upon to improve processes and understand how different business areas are doing.”

At first, it was still feasible for the agency to use basic tools, but as they grew it became clear they needed a more comprehensive system. 

“We’ve always delivered value to our clients, but we wanted to have accurate financial reporting to deliver better value to ourselves. We needed to understand underlying productivity and service levels to ensure we provided value for money to our clients while ensuring the business was resilient.”

“We knew we needed a system for resource and project management, as well as estimating, quoting and invoicing. We hadn’t been tracking time, and we’d grown to a point where a lack of visibility was no longer an option. We decided to make a big shift in the business”

The solution

Shifting into a scalable agency management

“We did look at other systems, but it was very difficult to find a platform that does it all – apart from Synergist. Most tools needed another tool plugged in or were not really suited to our needs.”

“The great thing about Synergist is you have everything in one place, so there aren’t multiple platforms to navigate and keep on top of. In previous agencies, I’ve had one for time tracking, one for invoicing, one for project setup, one for resources… In Synergist, it’s all in one platform, and you can have different permissions and views.” 

“We spoke with Synergist partner, Agency Works, to help us navigate exactly what we needed. They gave us lots of amazing advice, helping us with the setup and running bespoke training sessions. They really have been invaluable.”

The Agency Works tailored Synergist to fit all their requirements, creating a system that worked alongside them and could evolve with them. Justina rolled it out using a staged approach so she could tailor it to exactly what was needed and help get the team on board with each step.

“We wanted to get across this wasn’t just about the business itself but making life easier for everyone. Some of our team had never used timesheets before, and we needed to be clear that we weren’t checking up on them but rather gathering insights. In turn, this helped to improve processes, provide extra support when the team needed it, and help the business grow. And if the business does well, everyone does well.”

The return

More strategic decisions backed by data

Using Synergist fully has opened up discussions and conversations in the agency about how they can work smarter to deliver even more value, not just for clients but for the agency as a whole and the teams within it. 

“Synergist is changing everything we do, encouraging the right conversations at the right time.”

“Keeping on top of time is extremely important, and now we can open up a dashboard at job or phase level and see how it’s doing. We can see if we risk overrunning and solve problems before they happen. Estimated versus actual’ is fast becoming everyone’s mantra!”

“We can even look at performance across a whole account or groups of accounts, giving you so many different levels of insight. Senior management can understand which parts of the business are profitable and where we should focus effort.”

“We use the Kanban boards to manage creative and content projects, assigning people and time, helping to manage workloads and capacity. We can add the brief, details, and comments, allowing them to view in Synergist what they are assigned each day. We’ve tailored it for our needs, which is really useful functionality.”

“Just one year in and we’re already seeing the impacts of having this data, getting our resourcing right, looking at where and why we’re overservicing and understanding much more about how our time is spent. It’s challenged us to review how we’re costing projects and quoting clients, as we now have the data to support this. And we can be strategically smart, looking at growth and scalability knowing we have the right statistics to drive our decisions and improve reliance.”