One dashboard for every client, and the admin runs itselfA US digital marketing agency
772 hours a monthof work nobody could see, found and priced at $330,000 a year.
- 27.5%Of the growth gap, going into friction. Found
- 421 hrsA month engineered back across twelve workflows, projected
- 29Client brands on the one dashboard they run on
- 113Data connections, encrypted, zero decrypt failures
The challenge.
The agency had ambitious plans for growth.
The plans were sound and the demand was there. So we audited the processes instead, and counted the thing nobody counts: the work between the work.
Reporting was the wound everyone felt. The analytics platform disagreed with the platforms it was reading, so every account manager cross referenced three sources before every client meeting. Quarterly planning decks took three to fifteen hours per client, plus an extra hour each spent purely proving the numbers were right.
Content production ran on people. Coordinators spent five to forty five minutes hunting a single client asset. Every post was retyped from the planning tool into the scheduling tool, and the strategic call to action field dropped silently on the way across, because dropdowns do not travel. One person reviewed all thirty client content calendars, so when she was in meetings the whole pipeline stopped.
Onboarding crossed more than ten platforms with nothing connected to the signature. Folder structures retyped from scratch. Platform access collected on live calls, with two factor codes read aloud, dragged across two weeks. Four to six weeks from kickoff to the first post going out.
One director owned every deal end to end, with two years of cold leads sitting untouched. Client satisfaction was scored one to ten with no shared criteria, and a large churn event had gone undetected until a quarterly meeting. One community manager covered twenty five to thirty accounts across four platforms, then pasted Friday's output into twenty five separate channels by hand.
And then finance, which was the part that kept people awake. Commission was stitched together every month by hand from three disconnected sources. Time tracking ran from a stopwatch for some people and a Friday memory reconstruction for others, and those numbers fed the profitability figures leadership relied on. The one person who understood the whole process was leaving within weeks, and most of it was undocumented.
The finance lead described the monthly commission run as "literally crying at my laptop."
Counted up: 772 hours a month, priced at $330,000 a year. That is 27.5% of the entire gap between where the agency stood and the growth it was planning for. All of it going into moving information from one place to another.
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Start with the free consultationWhat we built.
Every system was designed against a named cost from the audit. Twelve of them.
The content pipeline generates the monthly tasks instead of someone creating thirty by hand per client, maps the transfer so the call to action field survives it, and returns unedited AI drafts to their author before a reviewer sees them. It also fixes the asset hunt at source, with a client file organisation sprint, rather than automating around a mess.
The onboarding cascade starts at the won deal. Provisioning fires across project management, storage, chat and accounting within minutes, contracts draft themselves from the intake data, the access sequence chases itself, and the strategy baseline is generated from the client's own questionnaire, website and brand documents.
Sales gets stage triggered sequences that pause the moment someone replies, research briefs in minutes instead of an hour, and automatic re engagement of anything dormant past ninety days.
Then the rest of the twelve. Meeting transcripts turned into pre formatted action items. Criteria based sentiment scoring with alerts on a declining trend, in place of a number somebody felt. A quarterly reporting system pulling straight from the platform APIs, which kills the trust problem at its source. And a financial engine that pulls all three sources, applies the proration logic, leaves an audit trail, and writes down every calculation rule, so the next finance lead inherits a system rather than five years of undocumented knowledge.
Projected back across the team: about 421 hours a month, weighted to the people who were most trapped. Roughly 145 to the social media coordinators, 135 to the account managers, 42.5 to the sales director, and the rest across community management, finance and the time tracking nobody was doing consistently.
Then the one they felt every week.
The reporting problem showed up in every client meeting, so the reporting system is the one they run on now. A multi tenant dashboard pulling ten channels into a single view per brand, from Instagram and TikTok through Google Ads, GA4, Klaviyo and Shopify. Spend, return on ad spend, email attribution, conversion funnels and on site behaviour in one place. Per client logins, so each client sees only their own. Encrypted credentials across all 113 connections, pulled daily on scheduled jobs, with AI written performance summaries on top.
And, given where this started, per platform reconciliation. Every number on screen can be traced back to the source it came from, with a running audit that finds discrepancies and closes them, instead of asserting the numbers are right once and hoping.
Three more systems run alongside it, and each one keeps a person in front of the consequences.
A sales workstation sits on the team's own machines. It researches a prospect across nine parallel surfaces and returns a structured brief in minutes, reads the agency's own index of past work and ranks what to reference for this specific prospect with a reason given per match, then drafts the full proposal against the agency's locked template and its own forecasting economics. Its connector into their sales system carries twenty four tools, and the seven that can write anything have to ask first.
A community management hub puts the conversations across roughly thirty client brands into one workspace, split per platform, with replies pre filled against an indexed answer library and sentiment classified as it arrives. A person reviews before anything sends, and a good reply joins the library in a single action, so the library grows by being used. Bulk select, react and archive, a notes panel per thread, and escalation out to the team's own channels when a thread needs a human properly.
And a post meeting agent picks up the call transcript on its own, works out which client and which account manager it belongs to, writes the recap in the agency's own locked format, extracts the action items, and scores client happiness against the agency's own rubric. Then it stops. It posts the whole thing as an approval gate, and nothing reaches the project system until a person accepts it, rejects it, or edits it in place. On one live approval it returned the happiness score and eleven due dates with no edits at all.
The results.
The agency that could not get two tools to agree on one metric now has a single place where the number is, and a way to check it.
29 client brands on the one system. 113 data connections, encrypted, with zero decrypt failures at rollout. 755,000 GA4 rows across four properties alone. Ten channels in one view.
One example of what that takes. A query that kept timing out was traced to its root cause and made 4,155 times faster, with correctness proven, after four earlier attempts had reasoned from the query planner instead of measuring it.
The design property worth naming is that the system is checkable. The tooling it replaced was not, which is why nobody believed it.
And the diagnosis is the part that travels furthest. 772 hours a month was not a suspicion anybody had. It was counted, priced at $330,000 a year, then designed into the systems that give those hours back, against the growth the agency had set out to reach. The finance lead is not stitching three sources together by hand any more.
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