Why timesheets matter

Hey everybody, Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute. This week I am coming to you from Captiva Island, Florida, and I don't know if you can tell behind me, but there's a storm coming in. So yesterday it was beautiful and it was sunny and it was a perfect day and today the mood has changed, the feeling in the air has changed, and the clouds are saying that something big is coming in and honestly that's what happens a lot of times in agencies and sometimes when I'm talking to an agency owner and by the questions they're asking or the challenges they're facing, I can tell that they've got a storm coming in and here's the number one clue for me that an agency has a storm brewing and they may or may not see it coming yet. And that is, that they don't do daily time sheets. I know that all of you, all of us, I hate them too. All of us hate time sheets. They're a pain in the neck. They're a challenge to get our team to do but they are the core element, a building block, that allows us to see if our agency is financially healthy or not. Time sheets that are not done every day, are 67% less accurate. And we already know by their nature because humans are filling them out and we're trying to remember what we did all day in accurate increments that they're going to be inaccurate anyways so you don't want to add to the inaccuracy by having them done once a week or even longer out than that. By the way, if you're the agency owner, I don't care if you don't do one lick of billable work. You have to do your time sheets too. I promise you, how you think you're spending your time and how you're actually spending your time are not the same thing. So I am a huge advocate for daily time sheets and there's some great techniques for getting people to do their time sheet on a daily basis. So if you go to Agency Management Institute and you look on the blog. Search in the search box up in the upper right corner for daily time sheet practices and I've got some ideas for you on how to get your team to do their time sheet every day. Because without that insight, without knowing how busy your people are, without understanding where they're spending their time, without knowing if you are on time and on budget for projects which you cannot accurately know without doing your time sheets. You're in trouble. The storm is coming in. You may not see it yet, you may not feel it yet but I promise you, sooner or later the storm is coming. I'm not suggesting that you bill by the hour. I think it's a bad idea. I'm all for project billing, value billing, however you bill. This is not about what you give to clients. This is about how you run your business and there's no more expensive part of your business than the people. And if you don't know if you're using those people well. If you don't know if you're leveraging them in every way possible. If you don't know who is fast on a task versus who is super slow on a task. You cannot possibly run your business well. So please if you have not implemented daily time sheets, it's way past time, and the best way to get people to do it is to set the example by you doing it too. So head over to the website, check out the article on how to implement daily time sheets and get started. Start tracking that data very accurately because it is a cornerstone, a foundational piece to all the other data that you need to be looking at to run your business well. I'll talk to you next week.