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Manage your company's profitability to ensure long-term success

Manage your company's profitability to ensure long-term success

By Hugo Iunk

Published: November 7, 2024

To ensure the long-term viability of a business, it's essential to check that it's profitable. But it's not as easy as it sounds. In the case of a service company that charges a fixed price for its services, this can sometimes take longer than expected. What then are the means at our disposal to ensure satisfactory margins? And more generally, what are the solutions that can help us stay on course? Find out all our tips on how to use time management in business.

Get a clear picture of the profitability of your projects

As you can see, the first thing to do is not to sail blindly. And the most important thing is to know exactly which projects or assignments are profitable and which are less so.
Analyzing the profitability of an assignment is one thing. But what's really important is to know what the net margin is. That's how you'll get as close as possible to your profitability target in future negotiations with your customers.

To take a concrete example, for a service company such as a communications agency, this involves several things:

  • listing the various expenses associated with the project: materials, external service providers, advertising space, etc.
  • knowing and calculating the hourly cost of each of the company's employees
  • keeping track of the time spent on the project in question, either simply with a timesheet system that each employee fills in regularly, or with time-tracking software that will optimize the process and save you many tedious and unrewarding tasks.

These operations give you a precise view of costs, and therefore of the margin generated on each assignment carried out. To help you do this, there are a number of efficient software solutions that will save you a great deal of time. Evizience software, for example, is a simple time tracking and profitability analysis tool specialized for advertising agencies or communications consultancies.

Focus on the right customers

Once you have the data you need to know the margin generated on each of your projects, then you can easily find out the profitability of your various clients.

It's important to have a clear and precise vision of the customers who are driving your company's results into the red, and those who are keeping it going! This will help you, for example, to target your sales efforts on those customers who will make your business flourish. Thanks to Evizience, you can obtain this data very easily, in a synthetic dashboard.

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Detect the activities that penalize your profitability

In the same way, with such a tool, it's just as easy to track the time spent on the different components of a project: the different deliverables of the same project, or the different types of work to be carried out on this project, for example.

This will enable you to see exactly which steps are slowing down the project, or which part has taken longer than expected. This will make it easier for you to draw up a reliable estimate, knowing which activities and jobs are going to take you a long time to complete.


In conclusion, it's important to understand that implementing a time-tracking process to analyze the profitability of your projects and customers will require a definite effort on your part, whether it's to explain and make your employees understand the objective of the operation, or to ensure that you have the necessary resources.to your employees, or to keep your staff motivated throughout this follow-up work, which will inevitably require a minimum of rigor.However, the adoption of a suitable time management software solution will guide you through this process and provide you with the essential framework for the success of such a project.

Article translated from French