A Portland agency delivering creative at volume had its numbers spread across four systems. Pulling project work, finance and time into one place took 12 percent off operating costs.
Thesis is a digital agency in Portland that delivers creative at volume. Its client list reaches as far as the largest sportswear brand in the world, which sets the pace for everything else.
The work was tracked in one tool, planned in another and costed in a third. Collaboration lived somewhere else again.
Nothing was broken on its own. Together it meant a producer could not answer a simple question without opening four tabs.
The cost showed up as time. People spent more of the day hunting for information than the agency wanted to admit, on work that had already been done.
What was actually going wrong before anything changed, and why it stayed that way so long.
The real bottleneck was the gap between the tools. Every handover between project planning and finance was a person retyping something.
That gap also decided what leadership could see. A number assembled by hand arrives late, so decisions about resourcing were made on last month, not on today.
Creative operations carried the weight. The team that should shape how work flows spent its hours keeping four systems in agreement.
Built inside the tools the company already paid for. Nothing exotic, put together in a different order.
A network of connected bases holds project management for every client account. A project is opened once. It carries its own plan, status and people from there.
AirtableTime tracking and financial reporting sit against the project rather than beside it. More than 500,000 hours across 3,500 projects now live in one system.
AirtableThe repetitive moves happen on their own: status changes, handovers, the updates that used to be somebody typing the same thing twice.
AirtableThe before column is where the company started. The after column is where it landed once every system was running.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Systems for planning, time and finance | Four separate tools | One connected system |
| Operating costs | Baseline | 12 percent lower |
| Hours saved a year by automation | None | More than 3,000 |
We went from disconnected tools to a fully connected, centralized system.
We are faster, more connected, and fully in control of our tools and processes.
Every story leaves one. Reading it is cheaper than learning it the slow way.
The build took three months, which is short for a system that replaced everything an agency runs on.
It worked because it was not a rewrite. The bases were assembled from how the agency already worked, then connected.
Demand for more came from inside. Once one team saw its own numbers in one place, the rest of the agency started asking for theirs.
The points the story turns on, in the order they happened.
Billable hours recaptured weekly: 50 h
Read the caseNew revenue, six months: $5M
Read the caseThe auditoría de IA y operaciones finds it, prices it, then hands you a plan in two working days. Your fee comes off the first thing you build with us.
