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How One PR Consultant Used Toggl Track to Find Time-Wasting Activities and Recuperate 20% of Profitability

Sweat + Co (formerly Mister Sweat) is a Los Angeles-based PR firm that specializes in media strategy, agency management consulting, and thought leadership. Their work takes them all over the world, from Cannes to the heart of Hollywood.

Industry

Public relations

Team size

Location

California, USA

Plan

Premium

Results

Increased profitability by at least 20%
Automated billing processes and mapped out allocation of hours to budget more efficiently
Increased visibility for remote work

Challenges

“For time tracking, we used to use this very sophisticated thing called Google Sheets,” Dax Kimbrough, business consultant for Sweat + Co, 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.”

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

"Toggl Track increased our profitability by at least 20%. We found out where the team was spending too much time on clients. 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."

Dax Kimbrough

Business Consultant with Sweat + Co

Solution

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

Sweat + Co measures the profitability of each client based on the number of hours they spend on a project. By recording billable hours with Sweat + Co clients, all Sweat + Co employees could understand which tasks were taking up the most time. “Toggl Track gives us better visibility into what everyone’s working on remotely,” Kimbrough 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, Kimbrough has gone through a number of different online time tracking services. At the heart of any PR project, there’s one vital calculation: If the amount of billable hours > amount budgeted in retainer, there’s a problem. You’re spending more on labor than you’re making.

According to Kimbrough, “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 mapping out the allocation of hours, Kimbrough is confident that the Sweat + Co 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.