How One PR Consultant Used Toggl Track To Find Time-Wasting Activities, And Recuperate 20% Of Profitability

Challenges

“For time tracking, we used to use this very sophisticated thing called Google Sheets,” Dax Kimbrough, business consultant for Mister Sweat, told us. “It was a mess. People would go in, enter their times, sometimes forgetting until after the weekend, estimating hours from days ago that no one could remember... honestly it was just a mess.”

Mister Sweat specializes in PR for advertising agencies. When Mister Sweat hired Dax’s company, Convection Consulting, Dax realized that they needed a remote solution to time tracking. Mister Sweat has people all over the country, and they needed reporting options that could serve to increase efficiency and therefore, profitability.

Solution

“Toggl Track helped us realize that we were spending a lot of time talking amongst ourselves, using up hours that weren’t billable,” Dax told us.

Mister Sweat measures the profitability of each client based on the number of hours they spend on a project. By recording billable hours with Mister Sweat clients, all of Mister Sweat employees could understand which tasks were taking up the most time. “Toggl Track gives us better visibility into what everyone’s working on remotely,” Dax said. They were surprised by the amount of non-billable, internal conversations they were having that were burning up an unusual amount of hours.

As a consultant, Dax has gone through a number of different online time tracking services. At the heart of any PR project, there’s one vital calculation: if amount of billable hours > amount budgeted in retainer, there’s a problem. You’re spending more on labor than you’re making.

According to Dax, “Toggl Track increased our profitability by at least 20%. We found out where the team was spending too much time. Whether that was us being inefficient or over-serving or working too slowly, Toggl Track gave us the ability to restrategize, find out what’s wrong, and fix it.”

In summary, with Toggl Track working to automate billing and easily map out the allocation of hours, Dax is confident that the Mister Sweat team can evaluate their time spent, long before a project’s billable hours spiral out of control. And, they’ve recaptured that 20% profitability margin, thanks to the increased transparency that Toggl Track affords.