Are you struggling financially, yet your fixed-price project isn’t profitable?

Who hasn’t experienced that moment of loneliness when your manager or the accounting department tells you that the project you’ve been spending your evenings and weekends on—the one that’s been driving you crazy for weeks or months—is incurring massive losses despite all the time and energy you’ve put into it?

Do you work on a fixed-fee basis? You know the answer yourself.

But why, even though you’re in the red, isn’t your project profitable?

First, the salespeople get the blame: they should have just charged more! We’ve already told them: “They’ll do whatever it takes to win the project, and then we’ll figure it out ourselves…” Another version: “They underpriced it because they don’t know what they’re doing,” etc., etc.

Salespeople sometimes accuse project management of “not knowing how to count”… Production blames everyone else.

In short, it’s everyone’s fault—and therefore often no one’s fault. And that’s exactly why this kind of situation keeps happening… all the time. What a scene.

In reality, this is typical of agencies that lack the tools and methods needed to manage fixed-price projects, which often reveal the weaknesses of an agency.

Here are a few basic rules that will help you turn things around:

Time Tracking

A simple question: Do you know how to track the time each person spends on a project every week? If the answer is “no,” “not really,” or “more or less,” it’s time to fix the situation.

Furious makes this task simple—even automatic—in 80% of cases. It’s a true transformation, both in your project management and in your production management.

Weekly review of projects and time spent vs. what was sold

Who at your company monitors project overruns on a weekly basis? Do you have a “shepherd” in charge of keeping schedules on track?

Even though in some agencies, overwork is the norm, it’s becoming less and less tolerated—and understandably so. Employees expect their company to be able to assess the workload and take corrective action when it becomes overwhelming.

Weekly sharing of project updates with the client

It’s essential to share information with your valued client at least once a week—including cost-to-sales ratios, the schedule, and invoicing. That way, they won’t be able to feign ignorance, and, more importantly, it will force you to address cost overruns as soon as they arise.

Furious lets you share these KPIs with your client with just one click!

Allocating the time spent on pre-sales activities to the sold project

When you win a project, you don’t just throw away the time spent on pre-sales. Normally, you’ve already made some progress on the project, so it makes sense to factor that time into the project timeline.

We actually talk about it here.

A Driving Force for Innovation

This isn’t science fiction—with great tools like Furious, you’ll know before it’s too late that a project is headed for disaster. These features help you monitor and control projects in real time by modeling complex projects and showing the estimated long-term profitability right from the start. A real plus for tactically managing your business!

Be able to analyze profitability

You must have an analysis of:

• Business profitability: time sold vs. time spent
• Net profitability: time spent × actual cost of the people who worked on the project vs. time billed.

To refine this analysis, it is crucial to include a return on investment (ROI) calculation, an essential method for accurately assessing the effectiveness of your projects. And to take it even further, AI-powered production planning automatically cross-references this data with time spent, costs, and projected workload to anticipate bottlenecks and optimize each resource. The distinction between the two will allow you to assess the workload of senior staff or interns, for example… and that obviously changes everything!

The Discontinuation of Unprofitable Projects

It’s taboo in the agency world, and yet it’s so necessary!

Don’t hesitate to shut down a project if it’s headed for disaster… before it hits rock bottom!

You have more to lose by overloading your teams (the cost of employee turnover is often underestimated in agencies) and keeping them busy on unprofitable projects than you do by losing a client.

To help you, business management tools like Furious are available to make it easier for you to track these issues in a highly visual way. It’s a valuable ally for optimizing your project management and action plan, while providing predictive insights that alert you well in advance, before it’s too late.

Another advantage (and not the least of them): teamwork runs more smoothly because we analyze challenges based on objective data, rather than on misunderstandings or biases between different roles and profiles!

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