Back in college, Michael Melen dabbled in SEO.
When he got out of school, the dabbling continued. This included consulting with the likes of Disney and Budweiser on their digital marketing campaigns. Then, in April 2011, Michael and his brother Alex opened a New Jersey based marketing agency called SmartSites to help companies succeed online.
In order to achieve this goal for their clients, SmartSites creates “distinguished brand identities, develops results driven websites, and creates online marketing that produces results.”
To help accomplish these initiatives for their clients as affordably as possible, SmartSites deployed Time Doctor to make their processes more efficient.
One such process is website development for their clients. Time Doctor gives Michael and Alex insights into the performance of their development team. These insights allow the founders to analyze where the developers are spending their time, what they are struggling with, and how to better utilize their skillsets.
For instance, one coder may be better at PHP while another coder may be better at Javascript. In this case, each coder will be deployed to best utilize his or her strength.
Over time, these insights have lead to a 35% increase in efficiency to the overall website development process from start to finish.
In efficiency in the total website development process from start to finish.
The amount of coding time went from 200 hours to 120 hours per website.
Onboarding a new developer to Time Doctor is incredibly easy. Michael simply sends an email invite to the developer and he is up and running within minutes. From Michael’s point of view, this is a hands-off process.
When trying to analyze his team using a competitor’s product, Michael was only able to see half of their work. This is because the competitor's software could only see one monitor connected to a computer at a time. Time Doctor tracks every monitor connected to a computer.
If a client asks how long a project took to complete, Michael can get this information in 3 clicks.
...Which is especially alarming for SmartSites’ fixed price business engagement model.
Several of SmartSites’s clients have projects with an extremely well defined scope of work. Usually these projects are WordPress sites with a certain number of pages and don’t include many “special” elements.
Before Time Doctor, Michael couldn’t be certain that these sites were always profitable. A scary notion for a self-funded business that relies on its customers for growth. With Time Doctor's time tracking for agencies, SmartSites has been able to create a predictable cost structure for their fixed-price business engagements that ensure both affordability and profitability.
“Don’t use it, so that I can keep the advantage.”
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