About
GEL Studios is a B Corp creative agency based in Swindon, Wiltshire. They offer a range of digital services, including marketing and branding, website and graphic design. What makes this exceptional team of 10 stand out is their approach to business. They are driven by a purpose, aiming to inspire change through creativity. They act as their clients’ strategic partners, offering bespoke solutions that fundamentally matter.
Graeme Leighfield founded GEL Studios back in 2013. As they scaled, they needed a better tool to manage their projects. They chose ActiveCollab, which seemed simple to use. The team quickly discovered the power behind that simplicity, as ActiveCollab helped them overcome important business growth challenges.
Challenge 1: Email-only communication hindered growth
For a scaling agency like GEL Studios, email can easily become a nightmare. Endless email threads would cause confusion and delays, files would get lost, key information unaddressed. GEL Studios wanted to avoid putting their client relationships and profit at risk because of this.
The solution: Streamlined client communication
GEL Studios streamlined their client communication with ActiveCollab Clients. Free of charge, GEL Studios can add as many clients to their ActiveCollab workspace, and keep them in the loop at all times. GEL Studios’ clients can take part in project conversations via Comments and Discussions, they can share their input, follow up, and even request additional services. They can also use email to send comments to ActiveCollab, and get updates.
“Keeping everything in ActiveCollab helped us reduce confusion and email clutter. We achieved 67% faster approvals, which is great for client relationships and retention.”
—Graeme Leighfield, Co-Founder and Managing Director, GEL Studios
Challenge 2: No workflow optimization with disconnected tools
Efficient workflows are indispensable for successful project delivery. The GEL Studios team initially struggled coordinating different activities, as they didn’t have the means to connect and optimize processes that would help them do more and better. This affected both their efficiency and their capacity.
The solution: A centralized workspace with automated processes
Using ActiveCollab’s API, the GEL Studios team found a way to combine their tools and create workflows that enabled them to do more and better.
The team’s built their own API integrations. For example, they:
use Google Sheets to prepare proposals, which, once approved, trigger the app to create a new project. This saves them hours of work as setting up new projects takes them only a couple of minutes,
extract data from their ActiveCollab workspace to build additional reports and better assess their performance,
built a tool that creates retainer tasks in projects months in advance, which ensures workload management is accurate and ready for planning new ad hoc projects,
combine their in-house agency management tool to set time off for several team members at once, so they don’t have to do it individually. This option works great when arranging company retreats and team-building events.
“Using ActiveCollab API didn’t only save us time and money. By reducing manual work, we improved efficiency by 15%. Instead of repetitive tasks, we were able to focus on what mattered more—creating solutions for our clients.”
—Graeme Leighfield, Co-Founder and Managing Director, GEL Studios
Challenge #3: A lack of clarity affects workload balance and realistic planning
Without the right tool, Graeme couldn’t get an accurate look into his team's daily and weekly capacity. This prevented him from assigning and prioritizing tasks in a way to ensure optimal capacity utilization rates, with 80% of his team’s time invested in client-facing, and 20% in creative, “freestyle” work. Plus, he couldn’t forecast too far into the future to meet his clients’ and prospects’ demands more accurately.
The solution: Workload planning, with achievable deadlines and a healthier workplace environment
In addition to numerous features for project management and team collaboration, what’s also helped GEL Studios improve their daily activities was Workload.
“The key ability for us is to set different hourly rates against different tasks, the ability to create different types of work, and being able to allocate individual tasks to individual people and view those tasks in Workload,” explained Graeme, and added: “We can define our working days, hours, off days.. We can plan and deliver quality work instead of lackluster results, while staying sane. No financial losses, no employee turnovers.”
“In Workload, we can forecast up to 12 months in the future. When we’re planning any new work, understanding a client’s schedule, seasonality, and things like that, we have a really strong degree of accuracy and trust that what we’re seeing is actually correct, which is especially great for sales.”
Overall impact
Using ActiveCollab helped the team better understand and manage the technical aspects of their creative business.
“We noted an increase in profitability by 10-15% as past project data kept in our ActiveCollab workspace enabled us to make more accurate new project estimates. Plus, our productivity improved by 15% thanks to ActiveCollab [Workload], saving our team about 50 hours per month, which is enormous in the long run,” Graeme said.
GEL Studios leveraged the power of ActiveCollab to build a collaborative environment that supports flexibility, transparency, and accountability. The team is eager to show up every day and deliver value for their clients, as well as their community.
In a webinar we organized, Graeme shared more about how he achieved to grow his business in such a unique way, how he built a thriving, productive team, and managed to stay profitable in a competitive business world. Check it out and get access to the recording here.