Yaroslav Vedmid is a head and founder of the Postmen digital agency. Its main areas of work are: strategy, creative, branding and design, content production, web and video production, and media strategy for marketing, cultural, charity, and educational projects and programs.
From a complete newbie to one of Ukraine’s top agencies
We’ve come a long way, essentially going from an office with two people to a team of 60 today. On top of that, we work with a lot of freelancers and contractors. The main value of our agency is efficiency.
What matters to us is the precise link between effort and result.
When did the idea of switching to hourly pay come up?
In our third year. The team already had 20 people by then. I personally spent a lot of time acting as the financial manager.
For a long time, we ran on my own financial-management principle — the “drawer” concept. What does that mean? If there’s more money in the drawer, things are good. If there’s less, things are bad. In other words, the “drawer” principle doesn’t involve any real management, and it works while the team is small and I, as the owner, am an integral part of it, feeling and controlling every process at my fingertips.
Once there are more projects, more specialists and departments, and the managers gain independence, that concept stops working.
That’s when several questions came up:
- How do we budget our services?
- What is our product, and how much does it cost on the market?
- How do we account for our costs?
- How do we keep control of everything happening at the agency?
These questions seem easy when you have 5 or 10 people “on board” and a few clients you do whatever they ask for. But once the team grows large and your market position becomes more defined — not anymore.
How did you change the financial accounting system at your agency?
It actually happened by accident (as many good things do). An acquaintance dropped by my office. Maria was on maternity leave then. She has an MBA and a background in finance, and she’d worked as an investment banker.
She told me she’d built a financial accounting system for her father’s small company, and said she had the time and the drive to build a better concept for our agency too. At that point, the “drawer” concept was still running.
I said: “Okay, Masha, let’s do it together”.
The first thing Maria said was: “We’re switching to hourly rates, because we need a reference point for calculating costs.
At first, the “hourly” tracking was recorded at the end of the workweek. Every Friday, we filled in the breakdown and noted what we’d worked on during the week.
What did it give us?
- We saw which clients were profitable and which were loss-making.
- We saw which areas and services were profitable and which were loss-making.
- We started transforming the business. We dropped the loss-making clients and areas and began working more confidently and actively with the areas and services that brought in profit.
We realized the time tracker works. Then a question came up: “How do we reduce the errors.
We started looking for a platform that could help solve this. At that stage of our growth, Google Sheets had appeared in our workflow. For a while, we wavered between the resources our IT department uses — Jira and Asana.
Our web development department worked on those platforms. But they were less suitable for the agency’s other departments.
Our web development department worked on those platforms. But they were less suitable for the agency’s other departments.
In the end, we chose Worksection. It was much less developed back then. This was 2015 – 2016.
We basically grew together with Worksection. We passed our functionality wishes on to the task manager’s team.
What changed once Worksection came along?
- The first result with Worksection is reporting
Controlling this biggest part gives us insight into the efficiency of the time spent working on projects and tasks. Then you can clearly speak to the state of a given project, service, or product.
- The second result with Worksection is a dialogue with clients.
Clients see the structure of projects, the cost of individual pieces of work, the number of hours spent working on a project, and the specialists and their hourly rates for that work. Clients see the whole picture and can ask questions the agency needs to have answers to — for example, does a task really need 20 hours of a specialist’s work? Maybe it needs more, or less?
The timer helps accurately count working time and build up the agency’s knowledge — data about processes and products.
Based on the reporting, we can agree with the client on major or minor changes to the work on a project, defend budgets, or discuss switching approaches or mechanics to more expensive ones or, conversely, more budget-friendly ones.
How do you use the time tracker in Worksection?
We count the average number of hours per employee. But we have departments where hourly accounting is hard to do.
For example, the creative derartment is such one. When the company has various departments, you cannot rely on just one indicator to measure your work efficiency. The creative and IT departments, for instance, have various senses of time allocated for work.
Do you use any specific project management methodologies in your agency?
Our web department works in the SCRUM methodology. Video production also works in SCRUM. In general, the agency business hinges on different clients, and we have to work with all sorts of them. Some use SCRUM, some don’t. There are clients we’ve worked with for a long time, systematically, using SCRUM for our joint projects.
We see one project with its continuation on the client’s side, and the client sees the continuation on our agency’s side. In effect, we become a single system.
Do you have your internal culture of operating Worksection?
At first, we simply had a “tome” or the Postmen Bible — a document about everything in our company. Now it’s all been consolidated into a single wiki system, where every employee can look up, for example, their job description, knowledge bases for projects and products, product pipelines, and standards.
In the near future, all of this will feed into an app that will move a project along and show both the client and the agency’s employee exactly where (at what stage) a project is, what should happen next, and compare a project’s current status with the planned one.
In the near future, all of this will feed into an app that will move a project along and show both the client and the agency’s employee exactly where (at what stage) a project is, what should happen next, and compare a project’s current status with the planned one.
We have a rule:
if a task isn’t in Worksection, it doesn’t exist anywhere — which means an employee is free not to do it.
Do you have your own experience of operating Worksection?
Not yet (ed.: smiling). As we roll out innovations, we’re trying to reduce my role at the agency to a strategic one. But sometimes I am an active part of a project.
The only thing is that it will take time on my part to record tasks and check them. But it will improve my interaction with colleagues.
What else has Worksection changed in the agency’s activity?
Worksection makes it more convenient for us to be able to explain what we are doing to our client. For instance, why project А, for instance, has Х budget, while project B has the Y budget.
Our goal, a few years out, is a fully automated system built on Worksection:
- Every employee should see the result and the effort spent.
- Every client should see the budgets and the results of working with us.
- We should see our own efficiency.