Achieving 35% more projects efficiency with Time Doctor
At a glance
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.
Founded
2011
Company Size
101 – 500
Industry
Marketing and Advertising
Location
US
Work Type
Hybrid
The challenges
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 meet its clients needs and provide an affordable service, SmartSites needed a way to understand time spent on different processes, to inform efforts to become more efficient and cost-effective.
The solutions
By deploying Time Doctor to improve how it monitors tasks like website development for clients, SmartSites gained insights into the performance of its 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. Knowing this enables each coder to be deployed to best utilize his or her strength. Over time, these insights have led to a 35% increase in efficiency to SmartSite’s overall website development process from start to finis
3 favorite Time Doctor features
Ease of use
Michael finds onboarding new developers to Time Doctor incredibly easy: by simply sending an email invite, a new developer can be up and running within minutes.
Tracks multiple screens
Previously, Michael was frustrated by gaps in the visibility of his team’s work when using a competitor’s activity tracking product, as it only tracked one monitor connected to a computer at a time. Now, with Time Doctor, he’s able to track every monitor in use.
Reporting
If a client asks how long a project took to complete, Michael can get this information in three clicks.
Conclusion
“Before Time Doctor, we were shooting in the dark…” …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.”
Time Doctor made our website development process 35% more efficient.
Michael Melen
SmartSites
