THE CHALLENGE
We started in 2006 with just the three co-founders working in sound design, mainly within the advertising industry. From year two and onwards we’ve had a fairly steady growth and are today 20 people in total. Music was added fairly quickly, voice casting is a newer venture (3 years), but has been a runaway success from day one.
As a small company, we originally relied on Google calendar to schedule our bookings. As we grew, we started looking at more tailor-made solutions. Prior to farmerswife, we used a program called Studio Suite. In theory, it was a good match for our needs, but being based on FileMaker it turned out to be horribly slow and clunky in day-to-day operations.
THE SOLUTION
We purchased farmerswife at the beginning of 2015. We needed to link all our bookings to our invoicing and also be able to handle our contacts and resources from one platform. farmerswife does just that. We use farmerswife for scheduling, invoicing, resource management and as a contact depository. We are also just starting to employ financial reporting through farmerswife, which is a logical next step for us in terms of monitoring our KPIs.
The immediate change for us was switching to a platform that actually worked and was efficient enough to not bring productivity to a halt. In hindsight, we should have made the move to farmerswife a few years earlier than we did, but better late than never. The KPI generation shows good promise in becoming a very valuable business asset for us moving forward.
We significantly improved efficiency with regards to project management. As a company handling close to a thousand projects per year, the accumulated benefit of this is huge. That in and of itself pays for the investment. Time is indeed money, as the saying goes.
As we are growing as a business, we are starting to peek at the add-ons in farmerswife that we as of today have not yet implemented. The financial reporting is a first step in broadening our use of farmerswife but I’m positive there are more things around the corner for us. We currently do not use farmerswife for quotation, that is likely the next thing we would look at from our end.
THE SUPPORT
As with all competent pieces of software, there is a threshold to cross when entering the farmerswife ecosystem. The training and ongoing support we received to facilitate this has been instrumental in getting everyone in the team aligned on how we best use the software. It is a software that can go pretty deep, and that means there will be questions to ask. But the answers are typically only a Skype call away, and that is exactly how you want it to be.
