Resource management, the process of maximizing the effectiveness of your team, is perhaps the most boring but most critical component of creating a profitable agency.
See it in action
Utilization needs to be managed from the bottom up, and reported on from the top down. In order to maximize your agency’s profitability you will need every resource, department, and client running as close to 100% as possible.
The Agency Resource Manager automates your operational capacity reporting by having all of your resources run their own dedicated sheets, that send data back to your dashboard. The Project Managers add new tasks and deliverable processes into the Dashboard and the tool pushes out the data to your resources own dedicated sheets.
No more having multiple people fumbling around in the same sheets – everything is separated out, permissioned, and authenticated within your closed loop of Google Sheets. All of your revenue and hourly projections are also automated.
Why use Agency Resource Manager?
– One-time cost – with expert setup if needed.
– Allows unlimited users – no additional payments per user like other tools.
– Has real-time reporting.
– Makes profitability reporting easy for departments, resources and clients.
– Has utilization tracking down to the minute.
The Agency Resource Manager runs on top of Google Sheets, and was designed to be completely data-driven, with all reporting happening automagically as tasks are completed and updated by resources using independent sheets (but that all send data back and forth to one another).
As your resources update tasks and hours in their own sheets, all of your reporting updates instantly in your Resource Manager Dashboard.
This is your 10,000 foot view of what’s going on within your agency.
At the highest level it’s showing you your total available resource hours (budget), the hours allocated, and each resources utilization rate (also conveniently grouped by departments).
This gives you a snapshot of how you’re doing – and if most of these hours are from Contractors (like they should be in the beginning) than it’s important to note that your utilization rate may seem artificially lower, even though you’re running efficiently from a profitability perspective.
This sheet is also your window into utilization by Department and at the individual Resource level.
The most important element of the dashboard is the DATE SELECTOR in the very top (cell B2) as this the controller for all the data displayed on this sheet.
This is where you add in your actual folks doing the work,
whether these are FTE’s, part-time folks, contractors or
freelancers – this is where your fulfillment pipeline should be built out.
For each resource add in the Name, Role (this is optional but I may add additional reporting functionality around this down the road), Department, Hourly Cost, and Monthly Availability.
If the Department is new, add the Department to the Departments tab first and then come back to the Resources
tab and it will be included in the drop-down.
Clients is a really simple view where you add new clients as they come on, not the ONLY field that is editable here is the Client Name, all the rest are calculated to track your
profitability for the lifetime of your Client.
The whole goal of what you're building is to make money.
Money (or more specifically, profit) comes from designing processes for everything you're building (and selling) so you can sell more > hire more > make more.
Deliverables within the tool is where you begin to standardize your processes, adding the tasks required for each and the amount of hours you expect it to require to complete.
The most impressive part of the entire tool (at least in our opinion) is the Projections tab where you can see projected revenue and production hours across all departments at a glance.
Use the "Stage" dropdown to set the stage within your sales pipeline to always have an accurate handle on your resourcing needs.
