How Create Health drove commercial insight with Synergist

The problem

No visibility to drive profitability

Create Health had the ambition to scale, but not the systems to back it up. Time and expertise are the agency's core product, and without clear data, it was hard to know exactly where profit was being made or lost.

“Like all agencies, we sell expertise and time. Maximising profit comes from how efficiently we use our team’s time and how effectively we manage projects. With plans to scale, we knew these two things would be fundamental to our success.”

"We didn't have an automated system to collect the right data or insight to drive profitability," says Ed.

That gap was what finally pushed the agency to look for something more robust. "We knew right away we needed a robust agency management system to help manage our resource and projects effectively and provide insight to help improve performance."

The solution

Software backed by real expertise

Create Health brought in Synergist, with hands-on implementation and training from Synergist's onboarding consultants.

"Having agency experts implement it all for us was really helpful. They made sure we had the basics in place, the right data and solid processes, to underpin our goals," Ed says. "They helped us set up the system to work with our existing agency processes, like how we run our projects and contracts, so we didn't need to change how we did the things that were working for us."

Efficiency gains came quickly, but understanding the data took a little longer. "Straightaway we were managing projects, clients and resources more efficiently. It also provided our account managers with more commercial data. However, they didn't fully understand which reports to run for the most useful insight, or sometimes what the reports were truly telling them. We knew we had room to improve."

That's where Synergist's consultants made the difference: a team of agency ops and finance experts who know how to make an agency really work. They worked with Create Health to input, track and report on the right data, building the confidence to interpret what it showed.

"Having the team share their knowledge with our team has been invaluable, even more so because they're the agency management experts. Working with hundreds of agencies, they're in the unique position of being in constant contact with senior agency teams. It gives them deep insight and understanding of what works, where to find flaws and which of the levers to pull to put things right, whether that be recovery, utilisation and/or capacity. They understand how agencies really run and make money. For us, being able to benefit from that industry knowledge has been game-changing."

The return

Commercial focus across the business

With the right data in place and the team trained to read it, Create Health now has commercial insight running through every department, not just at the top.

"Synergist has shone a light on our commercial data, helping us optimise performance and drive profitability," says Ed.

"Because the team applied their expertise to our systems, processes, operations and financials, we've felt the impact across the entire business. We're working more efficiently in every department. We spend less time on admin and processes because the system is working properly, and we know how to make it work for us."

"We're optimising projects better as we've simplified the performance levers, giving the client servicing team better metrics and reporting to drive efficiencies. They're now more commercially focused and making decisions which drive profitability."