THE CHALLENGE

Bdaily is a digital-first, national business news platform with a team of eight. Whilst publishing many brilliant stories, their team was often overloaded with delivery work, meaning they weren't able to fully focus on driving the business forward.

Additionally, on certain pieces of work, they were seeing margins dissipate quickly as a result of constant communication and time spent searching for crucial client and project information.

OUR APPROACH

To overcome this challenge, we identified that a core system upgrade, followed by a series of workflow upgrade projects, would be necessary to achieve the established aims.

We started by creating a roadmap which was tweaked and reviewed as we progressed and learned more about what needed to be prioritised to mitigate the symptoms of this challenge as fast as possible.

After establishing a new CRM and Work Management system which captured and stored information that could be accessed for automation and AI, we began monthly continuous improvement cycles as per the roadmap.

THE SOLUTION

Integrated CRM and Work Management Systems

After consolidating databases to reduce repetitive data entry, we connected Bdailys' CRM to their project management system so new projects flowed seamlessly from proposal to a well-managed project.

Automated Client Comms

We then connected the system to Gmail, allowing leads to be automatically captured and managed within the CRM, and enabling emails to be automatically sent chasing clients for the deliverables required for each project.

Work Management → Google Calendar

We configured a Google Calendar connection to automatically push project dates into their project calendars, the single source of truth the team refers to when checking publishing dates and project deadlines.

Automated Customer Research

We consolidated large volumes of dispersed previous customer data into one place and enriched the data so the team could identify intent signals and company updates, helping them spot opportunities for re-engagement.

CHALLENGE

Bernard Interiors is a 30 person architectural design studio which has been creating exceptional spaces since 2008.

When we met them, the Operations Director was facing an issue with limited visibility without clear insight into resource utilisation, time efficiency, project margins, or overall operational performance.

While they were using off the shelf software that worked well as a work management system, supporting them in the delivery of high quality projects, it simply wasn’t giving them the level of clarity they needed at the studio and business level.

Reporting required workarounds and duplicated data entry. Key metrics were difficult to extract. And important decisions were being made without a reliable, real-time view of how the studio was actually performing.

OUR APPROACH

In this case, we identified that implementing an integrated ERP system would be required to achieve the business’s vision for visibility.

To deliver this, we planned an implementation project that began with discovering the core jobs-to-be-done that needed to be developed within the system to properly support the business’s operations.

We then scheduled six build–test–learn cycles, structured as two-week development sprints followed by two-week testing periods. This ensured the system evolved based on real-world usage and feedback, rather than assumptions.

Finally, we provided comprehensive training for an internal system champion, enabling the team to confidently drive adoption from within and embed the new system into their day-to-day operations.

THE SOLUTION

A system covering project management, studio management, business development, operations management, resource management, and finances.

Beyond high-level visibility, meaningful workflow upgrades were realised, including the following examples:

Automated Production Team Meetings

For weekly production team meetings, project managers previously had to review all of their projects and manually type key deadlines into a spreadsheet. This is now fully automated, with summaries generated by the system ready for the meeting, and available for reference throughout the week by the entire team.

One-Click Project Planning

When planning projects, task plans can now be created at the click of a button and easily edited to suit each project’s specific requirements. Prior to this project managers and business development had to tediously rewrite plans or find similar projects and copy them.

Accrual Accounting

Management can now implement accrual accounting, with income invoices automatically spread based on when the team actually spends time delivering the related workload. Until now this was a manual process which would take up hours of the studio managers time every month.

Business Development pipeline

Business development can easily match key contacts to opportunities as they move through the pipeline, including linking invoice details for future reference. Keeping this detailed of a log of connections across the businesses network, helping the team to spot opportunities, has not been possible.

A solid platform is now in place, with clean, structured data accessible for further AI development and automation.

CHALLENGE

Equinet Media is the leading growth marketing agency for B2B manufacturers. Founded in 2009 and going strong today with a team of 20 people, sizing markets and identifying opportunities within them is essential, as it allows them to effectively allocate resources to maintain a healthy pipeline.

To achieve this, they had two options:

1 - Manually search through online sources and list businesses that fit their target market

2 - Attempt filtering on sales platforms and hope that the results are accurate

The problem with option 1 is that they would either have to pay for an external contractor to do the searching for them or use up internal resources. Even with a budget of one day a week dedicated to manually searching sources, it could take a year to form a clear picture of their market size and the opportunities within it.

Option 2 presents its own issues. With complicated and often inaccurate filtering options, any list outputted from a sales platform would either require scrutiny, also taking up resources, or would have to be treated as unreliable, meaning their target market size estimations would be all but useless.

OUR APPROACH

To tackle this, Equinet Media and Takeoff Tools teamed up on a workflow improvement project. As always, we followed agile methodologies, first building a prototype, then testing that prototype with the Equinet team, and finally developing a new version based on real user feedback, ensuring it worked exactly how they wanted it to.

THE SOLUTION

The outcome of this project was an AI Market Mapper, a tool that takes a descriptive input of a target market, identifies a list of key search terms related to that market, scours the internet for companies that may fit, summarises those companies’ websites, and scores them based on their similarity to the described target market.

Equinet Media now regularly use the tool to better understand their target market and identify other markets they could explore serving. They’re also using the results to direct their outreach and marketing towards the strongest opportunities.