Customer Success Story
Local Wisdom agency gains staffing and capacity insights with Resource Hero
Backstory
Local Wisdom is a unique agency that focuses on enabling mastery over everyday digital communications. The roughly 35-member team of designers, copywriters, coders, and project managers provides three distinct services: project-based services; subscription services; and “in-house studios,” specialized teams of Local Wisdom staffers who are installed at client locations to provide ongoing high-volume support.
Industry
Consulting agency
Employees
35
Projects per year
150
Challenge
Local Wisdom leadership had difficulty assessing its staffing needs. Knowing whether the firm had the bandwidth to handle another project was difficult. Plus, generating any kind of reporting was time-consuming, requiring as much as two full days of administrative work. Leadership sought out solutions, but they were either overly complicated or extremely costly. Local Wisdom needed something affordable, simple to use, and powerful.
Solution
Resource Hero is used across Local Wisdom by different teams for different goals. Creative staff like designers, developers, and copyeditors use Resource Hero to track their time and projects. Production and account managers use Resource Hero to forecast staff time for various projects. And leadership uses Resource Hero to get a bird’s eye view of the firm’s staffing and financial health. Local Wisdom has also created customized dashboards within Resource Hero to corral and analyze various data sets important to its day-to-day operations.
Results
What once took multiple platforms and days of administrative work is now centralized in one place, where data analysis is generated with the click of a button.
- Time saved: Prior to using Resource Hero, creating a report meant leadership and administrative staff had to spend two or three days per month just analyzing the data. Now, data is easy to understand and interpret at a glance.
- Better quoting: Forecasting and time tracking have become easier and more accurate with Resource Hero. That means Local Wisdom is able to offer more accurate quotes to its clients when a new project begins — and there are fewer surprises as a project progresses.
- Strategic project selection: Thanks to Resource Hero, Local Wisdom leadership can easily see what kinds of projects are profitable — and which aren’t. The value of this can’t be overstated for a consulting firm, which fields a variety of client requests.
- Staff Stability: When Local Wisdom has influxes of work, Resource Hero gives insight into which roles are working at capacity and when to increase staffing.
From the team
Our ability to have the data at hand helps us move toward higher profitability. We can look at the forecasted data versus the actual data, and it helps us forecast much better going forward.
Dan Spedaliere
Director of Production
Local Wisdom
