TEN7 Grows Headcount by 50% & Allocates its Resources Confidently
50%
79%
27%
Profile
Headquarters: Minneapolis, MN
Company type: Technology studio
Company size: 20 employees
Key Integrations
Harvest
HubSpot
The gist
TEN7, a technology studio whose mission is to Make Things That Matter, implemented Parallax to better determine if its team had the capacity and resources it needed to successfully take on new projects.
The challenge
At one point in time, TEN7 could easily figure out how to take on new work. The studio was small and nimble, and each employee could easily dive into new projects in support of a wide variety of tasks.
But that changed as TEN7 grew. As they added new employees, skillsets became more specialized, and it became harder to know, intuitively, how much capacity the team had available.
“The primary issue we had was not being able to know exactly what our capacity was, how that might change, and how much work we could take on,” said Ivan Stegic, CEO of TEN7.
If the studio wanted to scale its mission, it had to know — with certainty — whether its employees had the capacity to take on new work or if it needed to hire.
The solution
TEN7 implemented Parallax after learning about the professional services automation (PSA) platform from the Bureau of Digital. The team was excited to find a product that integrated seamlessly with its CRM (HubSpot) and time tracking tool (Harvest). These integrations meant that Parallax could pull data directly from the tools the team already used and loved. There was no need for TEN7 to learn new platforms or adopt entirely new operational workflows.
TEN7 now uses Parallax as its PSA to:
- Understand the studio’s planned capacity using project details from its sold work and deals projected to close in the sale pipeline
- Identify where there are resource gaps to proactively inform the studio when and who it needs to hire
- Compare the team’s planned work to their actuals (i.e., calculate project variance)
- Communicate proactively with employees about where they should dedicate their time each week
- Forecast revenue
I sleep better knowing the data I get from my Director of Operations is true to what we actually need in terms of capacity. If I didn’t have Parallax, I’d be taking a stab in the dark as to how much we need to hire for.
What’s next for TEN7?
TEN7 has even bigger plans for how it will leverage Parallax. The studio soon plans to use Parallax to pinpoint where their project margins are too small and identify opportunities to improve them. TEN7 also intends to sharpen its annual revenue forecasting, with Parallax playing a leading role in the effort.