Time tracking
When someone changes logged time, the change should leave a mark
Silent edits to time entries are how disputes start. We made time changes a request a manager reviews, so the record is auditable, not rewritten.
Blog
Opinions on estimating, tracking, and getting paid for client work. No listicles.
Estimations
An estimate is a promise. Treat it like one.
A good estimate is not a guess you email and forget. It is a record with a status, an owner, and an approval. Here is how we think about the estimation workflow.
Product
The gap between the estimate and the payout is where money leaks
Most teams estimate in one tool, track hours in another, and settle up in a spreadsheet. Every hop is a place a number gets lost. Here is why we built the whole loop into one system.
Business
You do not need eleven tools. You need four that agree with each other.
Stack bloat is rarely a spending problem. It is the cost of every seam between tools, paid weekly, in someone's afternoon.
Payouts
Paying contractors on time is a retention strategy
The best contractors are not chosen by rate. They are kept by predictability, and nothing signals predictability like a payout that arrives without being chased.
Client management
Client onboarding should be boring, repeatable, and mostly finished before kickoff
The first two weeks set the tone for everything after them. Improvising them per client is the most expensive habit in a small agency.
Growth
From freelancer to studio: surviving your first ten clients
Everything that worked at three clients breaks somewhere between six and ten. Here is what breaks, in roughly the order it happens.
Agency operations
Why a generic kanban board breaks the moment money is involved
Kanban is a great way to see work move. It is a terrible way to see whether the work is worth what you are paying for it.
Agency operations
“Waiting on client” is not “in progress”
Most project statuses answer "is it done?" The more useful question, and the one that costs you money, is "who is holding it right now?"
Agency operations
Your margin is decided in week one, not at invoice time
Unprofitable projects rarely fail at the end. They fail in the first week, quietly, and nobody notices for another month.