How Rise at Seven Increased Agency Utilisation from 50% to 80%

What separates highly profitable agencies from those that constantly feel stretched?

For many agency founders, the answer isn't simply winning more clients or asking people to work harder. It's building better operational systems, improving resource planning, understanding the numbers behind the business and making more informed commercial decisions.

In this episode of The Fractional CFO Show, Adam Cooper sits down with Ryan McNamara, Global Operations Director at Rise at Seven, to explore how the agency transformed its utilisation from around 50% to 80% over a two-year period—and, more importantly, what other agencies can learn from that journey.

Ryan has spent his career building and improving operational systems across creative and digital agencies. Having founded his own business before moving into senior operations leadership, he understands both the entrepreneurial and operational challenges that agencies face as they grow.

Rather than discussing theory, Ryan shares the practical lessons learned from implementing operational change inside one of the UK's best-known agencies.

Together, Adam and Ryan explore why agency profitability is often driven by operational excellence rather than cost-cutting, why better resource planning creates better client outcomes, and why finance, operations and client services need to work together if agencies are to scale successfully.

One of the biggest themes throughout the conversation is changing how agencies think about utilisation.

Too often, utilisation is viewed purely as a finance metric or something used to monitor employee performance.

Ryan explains why that's the wrong approach.

Instead, utilisation should be viewed as an operational planning tool that helps agencies:

•  Deliver better work for clients 
•  Improve project profitability 
•  Make more informed hiring decisions 
•  Build stronger commercial awareness 
•  Increase operational efficiency 
•  Support sustainable agency growth 

Rather than creating pressure, accurate operational data should help leaders make better decisions and give teams the support they need to succeed.

In this episode we discuss:

•  How Rise at Seven increased agency utilisation from approximately 50% to 80%
•  Why improving utilisation takes time, consistency and leadership rather than quick fixes 
•  Why so many agencies struggle with utilisation, timesheets and operational discipline 
•  Why scheduling matters more than timesheets
•  The difference between measuring historical performance and planning future capacity 
•  How resource planning improves both agency profitability and client experience 
•  Using utilisation data to support pricing decisions and improve project profitability 
•  Understanding when work is under-scoped and when projects need to be repriced 
•  Why timesheets should never be used to "police" employees 
•  Creating a culture where operational information helps people rather than punishes them 
•  How accurate data improves training, coaching and professional development 
•  Using operational data to support recruitment and hiring decisions 
•  Why utilisation acts as an early warning system for future capacity challenges 
•  The relationship between capacity planning, resource allocation and commercial performance 
•  Bringing together finance, client services and operations to improve decision-making 
•  Why operational leadership is ultimately about people, not process 
•  How agency founders can introduce better planning without creating unnecessary bureaucracy 
•  Why processes should support outcomes rather than dictate behaviour 
•  The importance of understanding your financial numbers before adding operational complexity 
•  Ryan's recommended business books on operations, leadership and continuous improvement 

One insight that particularly stood out was Ryan's observation that:

"Timesheets tell you what has happened. Scheduling tells you what happens next."

It's a deceptively simple idea, but one that completely changes how agencies should think about planning.

Timesheets provide valuable historical data, but scheduling allows agencies to proactively manage future workload, resource allocation, project delivery and profitability.

Throughout the conversation, Ryan explains how better scheduling allows agencies to identify future bottlenecks, improve client delivery, make smarter hiring decisions and ultimately build a healthier business.

The discussion also explores how operational data supports commercial conversations.

Instead of relying on gut feel, agencies can use accurate information to understand:

•  Whether projects are profitable 
•  Where teams need additional support 
•  Which departments require investment 
•  When additional hiring is justified 
•  Where clients may need to be re-scoped or repriced 
•  How to balance client delivery with long-term sustainable growth 

These are exactly the kinds of conversations that founders, operations leaders and finance professionals need to be having if they want to build resilient businesses.

Whether you're running a creative agency, digital agency, marketing agency or another professional services business, the principles Ryan shares are highly transferable.

If you're responsible for agency operations, resource planning, financial management, commercial performance, project profitability, capacity planning or business growth, this episode is packed with practical advice you can implement immediately.

About The Fractional CFO Show

The Fractional CFO Show is hosted by Adam Cooper, Founder of ACC Finance Solutions, where each episode explores the financial, operational and leadership challenges facing founders, CEOs and senior operators.

Rather than focusing purely on finance, the show looks at the commercial decisions that help businesses become more profitable, scalable and resilient.

Guests share practical experiences, honest lessons and actionable advice for business owners looking to improve performance and build stronger organisations.

If you enjoy this episode, please consider following the show on your favourite podcast platform and leaving a rating or review—it really helps more founders discover the podcast.

Connect with Ryan McNamara on LinkedIn to follow his insights on agency operations, leadership and operational excellence.

For more episodes and resources, visit ACC Finance Solutions.

Transcript

Adam Cooper (00:01.658)

Okay, so today I'm joined by Ryan McNamara, the Global Operations Director at Rise at Seven, where he's helped drive some major operational improvements across the agency and we're helping us to understand today about how to increase utilisation. So Ryan, welcome to the Fractional CFO show. How are you doing today?

Ryan McNamara (00:20.93)

Good, thank you Adam. How are you doing?

Adam Cooper (00:22.984)

Very well, thank you. Very well, and thanks so much for having you on. And I think it'd be great to just hear a little bit before we we jump in about your background. I I I noticed you at Loughbury University, which I I love 'cause that was my my uni my uni back in the day and then you've you've worked your way through a bunch of different operations roles. So it'd be great to hear a little bit in a couple of minutes about your background and how you got to how you got to Rise at seven.

Ryan McNamara (00:47.31)

Sure, okay. So yes, to be honest with the story really does start at Loughborough in lots of ways. The main thing was that as I was graduating, 2008, the recession hit and there were literally no jobs around. I did a degree in ergonomics, so user systems, and a friend of mine was finishing up his PhD in website effectiveness and was like, I have some work for some friends. Do you fancy, whilst you're looking for a job?

learning how to dev and we can do some websites together. So I did and by the time he graduated six months later we had enough work to start a company. Myself and him ran that for 10 years. We had a good steady little income in terms of like 10-ish employees from up to.

We were working predominantly in sport and branding and design because if you go to Loughborough, that's the contact you have at the end of the day. But it was great because I went to Loughborough to do sport and to be able to work in it afterwards was amazing. After 10 years, we still very good friends, but we were just on different paths. So I sold up to him and I joined a company called 6B in Wakefield as me and my wife moved up to Yorkshire.

like most people in operations, that's set out to be in that role. It's because you've learned various skills from various different parts of the business that you sort of get pushed into that role. And as 6B grew, as we honed down on our skill set, which was effectively health tech and health care integrations, because I had been a dev at the time.

I'd been a designer, brand work, PM, account management. Through owning a business, you have to do all those things. It was the logical thing that I moved into the operations director role at 6B. We had a very good chairman at the time called Martin Bolle, who was CEO at J-Wing, who were a mass international agency.

Ryan McNamara (02:49.026)

But he admittedly said that operations wasn't necessarily his thing. And my role was to try and make sure that we hit EVE every single month. At that point, I had no idea what that was, because it was just a load of letters put together. But that was the start of my ops journey in the idea that how do we drive efficiency? How do we drive actual great delivery of work through various different means to enable you to become a profitable business?

worked at 6B for a good few years, I it was five and half in the end. And then I joined RISE two and a half years ago in the head of operations role and I've recently been promoted to global ops director. So very much the journey of a lot of ops people in the jack of all trades, master of none in lots of ways, but being in the different roles I've had, I still maintain ops is very much a people first role. And that's how I try and approach it at RISE.

Adam Cooper (03:46.759)

Nice. Okay, great. Great potted history there. And yeah, very interesting and often the story as you say, how people fall into those roles is is is always an interesting journey. Having also studied sports science at Loughborough at like ending up doing what I do was certainly not on the on the cards and sounds the same. so yeah, I guess today we're gonna dive into something that you're an expert in and obviously just touched on there is how you drive efficiency, how you improve profitability in eBay, as you say, without

Ryan McNamara (03:56.93)

course.

Ryan McNamara (04:00.55)

Yes, no, no, definitely not.

Adam Cooper (04:16.54)

sort of damaging the culture without damaging the the relationships. and so utilization is obviously critical to that. and and it does get a bit of a bad rep. So but it it's incredibly important. And you've mentioned that since you joined Rise you've been able to to move utilisation up from around the 50% mark, I think you said when we when we spoke up to around 80% over the last few years. So yeah that's obviously a huge shift. What

What was it that sort of made you able to to make that change? How were you able to move the agency from from fifty to eighty percent?

Ryan McNamara (04:55.629)

So I think one of the main things that people think about when it comes to utilisation is that it's quite an easy thing to turn on and off. People are doing the work already, so why can they not time shift it to be correct? But a lot of what you have to do is education and time with the team to make sure they understand why it's important. And then it does become a bit of a snowball. It was...

with lots of things you get initial spike because it becomes a thing and everyone remembers, utilization and time sheets and all these things, they're more important now. So we have to show that we're doing it. And over time it plateaus and you start, it backslides a bit so you have to continue to reinforce it. It did take nearly two years to go from 50 % up to 80. We...

It took a year and a to get to 70, so a bit of time to get to that point. And in the last six months, was very much a plateau until the start of the year, just before the start of the year it did click. But it was just continually spending time with the team, letting them understand why it's important. yes, timesheets and other things like that can feel burdensome because...

if you're doing exciting, creative work, why do you have to actually record what you're doing? Isn't that just someone being big brother and looking over my shoulder and trying to figure out if I'm doing too much work or not doing enough? But the thing that I've tried to say every single time I talk about timesheets is, anyone, you can obviously put your hand up, have I ever come at you for not doing enough work for your timesheets? And the answer is always no, because I've never spoken to anyone and said, at your timesheets, you're not just doing enough work.

value of that time, the value of what a person can do through their creative means isn't always done through their 80 % utilisable times, it's the value that they'll be delivering to clients.

Ryan McNamara (06:57.229)

But we're just capturing that to understand, firstly, are we profitable with the work that we're doing? And secondly, we need to, is certain things that we underscoping, so we're under costing and that we're consistently spending more time than we're quoting for it? Or is someone in need of training? Because they're doing other things fine, but some think they're always taking longer than the rest of the team. And so it shows in our training plans.

Adam Cooper (07:21.524)

Mm-hmm.

Ryan McNamara (07:22.987)

And think making sure that people understood and felt that they were never being chastised for not doing enough work helped. also, whenever we do training, whenever we do onboarding, you people, I always say that same thing, but at the same time, it's the case of, but I will be annoyed if you don't submit on time.

because that's the only thing I'm asking of you when it comes to time sheets. You be as accurate as you possibly can. I'm not saying time every time you go to the toilet or make a cup of tea, but be as accurate as you can with the time constraints that you have to give us the most accurate information, submit it on time and we're all good. But the later you wait, the less accurate it is. And so it becomes, then it becomes burdensome for everyone because it takes more time for you to figure it out.

But also you can start showing people the value of what Timesheets does, especially when it comes to the client services team or the project management team or heads of department, because as soon as they begin to start tweaking, this is really important for me because it shows how efficient my team's to be in or where I've got gaps in skill sets or where I've got actual, you know, I've got teams that can spend more time on something or they're doing really well at something else. It becomes a lever for them to actually

drive better culture and performance in their teams as well. Because we've never used it as a stick to beat anyone with, it's always been something that is tried to be used as enhancement in the business.

Adam Cooper (08:47.304)

Yeah, no, I think that's that's super interesting and and so true, I think, in my own experience of the fact that using it as a as a carrot rather than a stick in terms of the way that you get people to to sort of adhere to it and follow it and show them the value of it rather than, you know, being a as you say, a stick to beat them over the head with, often lands better. why do you think from what you see in other agencies and you know, in in your own experience, why do you think so many agencies struggle

Ryan McNamara (09:04.653)

Exactly.

Yeah.

Adam Cooper (09:16.636)

to improve you know completion rates, utilisation rates, billability. What what is it that that causes them to struggle but you're able to to succeed in this from from the conversations you have with other ops directors and other business owners?

Ryan McNamara (09:30.349)

think there's a couple of things. Firstly, they don't give enough time, enough time to actually affect change. Like I said, this took us two and a half years and everyone I speak to has to say, this does take a bit of time and you have to stick with it. not like it'll be tough at points and you'll have down months, but persistence with this and you're continually improving over time is the only way you're going to get it from 50 to 80%. There's no other real way.

Second point is I think a lot of agencies are spun out of creative people being very creative and good at their job and they don't always see the value in time sheets or understanding the numbers behind an account until they get to a particular point in time and then they realise, oh, this does matter to me. I need to know how much money I'm making on a project or how a department is performing or...

should I be investing in this department because their utilisation is really high and their allocation is really high over a period of time, then it becomes important. But they don't necessarily, they haven't spoken about it enough or valued it enough for a period of time and so the business inherently takes their traits and they don't see it as an important thing and then it gets induced, it becomes again like I said something that's quite burdensome on them.

I think one of other bits is that we just picked up on is that a lot of people use it as a way to...

Effect change in a way that doesn't sit culturally quite well, like I said, it's not a stick to beat anyone with, it's a way to understand what you're actually doing as a team. It's not someone's fault if they are time-sheeting.

Ryan McNamara (11:14.892)

wrongly, it's not someone's fault if they're taking too much time to do something if they haven't been effectively trained on something. It's a way to learn about the business and learn about the team members you have and when you phrase it like that and look at it like that and show the team that that's how you're using it, it makes a lot more difference because then you'll find people actually begin to timesheet accurately. Like everyone will probably find that everyone at first will timesheet 37 half hours because that's what they're told to do.

One of the things we say is, I understand in some weeks you're not going to be 37 and half hours and there might have been something cropped up and you can't timesheet it against something. Don't, there's no point. But there's some weeks you might unfortunately be doing couple of three, four, five hours over time. Tell us because again, I'm not going to shout at you for doing these things, but if we don't know you consistently...

overworking and that we need to either give you some up-skilling time to stop that from happening or give you some support from elsewhere. We can't know this unless you accurately time-shoot the amount of time you're doing so we can actually support you on that, not throw up barriers to stop that from happening.

Adam Cooper (12:24.914)

No, I think that's exactly right. And I was just as you were saying saying that there I think the the education piece is so important, both from to understand how to do it properly, but also to educate them on on what you're doing with the information.

after the fact. So if someone's over delivering or over servicing a particular client, that that information provides ammunition and allows you to go back to client in your quarterly business reviews or when you're having your next meeting and explain the over delivery and you know potentially rescope, potentially reprice, you know, clarify to the client, right?

Ryan McNamara (12:57.388)

Yeah, I mean, we've used it for that. And it's also one of the things is it's team, like team leads or the of department who want to hire more people. How can we justify that without the information? You might tell us you're really busy, but all the numbers your team are doing is telling them they've got time. So if you can get them to accurately time sheet and show us what's going on, really, then yeah, this is a conversation we should be having. But at the moment, it's a finger in the air and like...

there's no justification for it. Yes, you can sort of say, look at the quality of the work, slipping and all these bits and pieces, but that's a training issue for me. It might be that there's other bits and pieces that you can put into this business case, but the reality is that your team should have the time, unless they're not accurately time-sheeting.

Adam Cooper (13:44.563)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly right. And I know from a CFO perspective we will always ask to see that business case and we will always link it to what your team are submitting around time. So if there's something wrong with the timesheets, it makes your case a lot harder to deliver. So yeah, absolutely right. one thing you said when we had our intro call that stood out to me was that scheduling matters more than timesheets. Can you e explain what you meant by that?

Ryan McNamara (13:58.474)

Exactly.

Ryan McNamara (14:08.768)

Yes.

Yeah, sure. So time sheets are there. That's what's happened. So you can't really affect anything on that except for learn that, like I said, someone's taking too much time to do this or we've overspent here or this team member has worked over and above this week or this month and they've done far too many hours and there needs to be support there. If you then, but, so you can't change the fact of the matter there.

But if you can look at the schedule and get the schedule as accurate as you possibly can over the coming months or you know the next week, next two weeks, month, couple of months, then you can actually make a change. So if you've not been able to deliver the quality of the work to a client and you can see that we haven't really got too much time associated with them in coming months, that could be a business case to over service because you want to keep that client, want to do a good job.

On the other hand, it might be that, you know, we've pretty much delivered what we need to do for this client. It's coming down, there might not be I there's no upsell opportunities in this in the future. So there might be some time you need to take from there to place elsewhere, because there's just far too much time there. Or you might have recognized the load of the revenue over the course of the last couple of months. And actually what you need to deliver is quite minimal, so you can take some time. What I'm trying to get at is, if you're...

Your schedules are fluid and your schedules are something that you can affect and change to actually deliver better work for clients and be more proactive and efficient with what you're doing in the business. You can't affect time sheets because that's what's happened, but the actual schedule is the roadmap for what you're going to be delivering. So get that more accurate. Have more time spent with the team, making sure that you have enough time, resource and the skill sets to deliver great work. And that's what will follow.

Adam Cooper (16:05.564)

Yeah, no, absolutely. I love that. And I think the fact that you're starting with the timesheet and then using that to educate the team about, you know, resource planning and about scheduling and about how we service the client going forwards, that's such a s important and vital skill. And I wonder how do you do you follow that approach whereby you use the timesheets as a kind of a a way in to inform around the benefit of scheduling accurately, budgeting and planning accurately.

Or are the two kept separately from you from an operations perspective and from from your your business f overall?

Ryan McNamara (16:37.994)

No.

Ryan McNamara (16:41.597)

No, we use both when it comes to traffic conversations, which is like a weekly thing between our US team or UK team, or when it comes to revenue recognition and those discussions. So they're both used to make sure that.

we know what we have delivered and the amount of time we spent delivering already compared to what is left to do for this client, what opportunities do we have to over deliver and do some great work for them, but also have we got the time scheduled in order to deliver this. And you can have the conversation around it took us X amount of time to do this last time, we don't have that amount of time in this time, what's going on. So yeah, we do use both to make sure that we're making more informed decisions.

Adam Cooper (17:29.79)

Great. And that traffic function, i Rise, is that something that you keep separate from ops? Is it part of your role? How do you how do you manage that?

Ryan McNamara (17:39.212)

Yeah, so we have a senior ops lead in the team, Holly, who runs that. And she obviously, she also, along with Emily and Naomi, who's our finance and head of client services, very much involved and they're also very much involved within the revenue recognition conversation as well. three do the vast majority of the heavy lifting when it comes to the understanding of those numbers.

So traffic calls are run by Holly and so she's there understanding what's, you know, what are the priorities over the course of the coming weeks? Where have we actually got capacity to deliver and over-deliver clients? The things that we need to deliver for particular clients, do we have the right resource booked in already to be able to do that? All those bits and pieces. Then when it goes to revenue recognition, you've got...

Emily and Holly will run that. So Emily is head of client services along with Naomi, who's our financial controller. And the role at that point is how much time have we used? What is the value of that to the client? As in, this is what we said we're going to deliver. This is how much they said they were going to pay for it. And so have we been able to deliver that value to that client in the timeframes that we said with the amount of resource that we said? And then what do we have booked in?

you know, from a cost-value perspective to actually deliver what's coming up so we can make better decisions in that way. Now, it's all data at that point, but in reality, it still comes down to people being as open and communicative as possible when it comes to delivering work, because it can be ticked off in the system, but that might not always be, yeah.

the absolute truth. So we try and keep those people in loop as much as possible. Keep the meeting separate because you're having different conversations with different people. But very much those guys are the ones who are in the loop and driving those conversations.

Adam Cooper (19:31.155)

No, I love I love how integrated that is and you you know, bringing finance, client services and ops together into that one sort of working group, ensuring they talk with each other and then ensuring that feeds back to the wider team. That's the key.

Ryan McNamara (19:44.341)

Sure.

Adam Cooper (19:45.297)

And yeah, I think you can do that with I'm thinking about some of the clients we work with which are on the slightly smaller end of the scale, where you might not have all of those roles. It's more about the functions. It doesn't necessarily mean that you need three people in three different roles. It's just having that joined up communication and approach. and I'm interested, like you you mentioned you dropped in there that you've got a US function and a US team. And so that becomes even more important where you've got multiple sites, multiple offices in different time zones. Can you you t

Ryan McNamara (19:54.216)

it

Ryan McNamara (19:59.071)

Bye.

Ryan McNamara (20:14.856)

Yeah.

Adam Cooper (20:15.19)

Tell us a little bit how the US team feed into that process as well.

Ryan McNamara (20:19.306)

Sure, I mean, we do, we keep the US traffic and the US revered conversations separate, but we include Holly and Naomi will be involved in those. Emily is like UK based, so she does the US, the UK client services team. We don't have a US client services team. It's a smaller business, it's a smaller team right now. So we don't, it's just not a function we've built out. So we have similar, like I said, similar functions in terms of the structure.

but they're occupied by different people. So what we have on every single account is what's deemed a commercial owner, which is the person who has the high level commercial ownership with the client. They're the ones negotiating contracts. They're the escalation point and the most senior person on that account.

Adam Cooper (20:51.87)

Mm.

Ryan McNamara (21:07.946)

We then have the day-to-day account lead, so they are the client-facing person, which can be, even the UK side, can be occupied by a PR if it's a single channel account, but they are very much the face of the project. They're making sure that the comms are tight with the client, that they know what's being delivered and what has to be done. The person that, almost like conductor.

of the account themselves, so making sure that if there's any risks to delivery or any risks to something that we're going to give to a client because we haven't got enough people on the team or the skill sets are not quite right or actually what we're delivering here isn't quite right, they're the ones who occupy that. And then we have what's deemed delivery lead on every single account. They're doing more of the...

delivery management or project management when it comes to day-to-day admin, ensuring that.

notes are followed up with after calls with clients and that they're written up and structured correctly, making sure that the to-dos and the checkboxes that we have to every single account is in place so the team know what they're delivering on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis and the admin of just making sure the systems are up-to-date as best as possible. So then we're trying to ensure that when it comes to the day-to-day admin and you know.

tick box exercises, they're covered by someone who is learning to be an account lead. Account lead is learning to be a commercial lead. And so it all flows through in that way. And it works across the UK team because in client services when we attach like an account manager, know, account director, etc. to accounts, we know exactly where they sit. In the US team, it works as well. But it's more done by the craft team members.

Ryan McNamara (22:58.29)

as well as their day-to-day job. we had to design the system to work across both with varying different skill sets.

Adam Cooper (23:06.652)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. No, that's really interesting. and in terms of obviously you mentioned you've got those three roles, who's responsible for the profitability on the account? Is that the commercial owner, the commercial lead, or does everyone have different levels of responsibility, different KPIs? How do you how do you manage that? Speaking as a CFO and with my finance hat on.

Ryan McNamara (23:25.172)

So, yeah, so this was a really interesting piece because in lots of ways, the commercial outcome of an account is gonna be based on what you schedule and how you deliver. So we do include delivery leads who are the most junior people in conversations around, we have enough work? Have you scheduled enough time to deliver this work on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis?

so that we can then look at that and go, cool, we feel confident that based on what we've got scheduled, we can deliver the revenue to the business, but also the work to the client. They don't have any commercial input, reliefs, but we're trying to show them that if you schedule things correctly and make sure that all the information is up to date, you're going to deliver things on time and in budget.

Account manager is responsible for ensuring that we're on track for that. So in the racing, they're accountable for the actual commercial outcome of the account. And so when it comes to our commercial calls or wherever it calls, they're the ones saying, look, this is where we are. This is where we're going to come out of this week, this month. This is where I feel confident or this is where I feel that we're going to have some issues with delivery. We might have to pull back some revenue.

commercial lead is the one that all the escalations go to. They're obviously the one who takes all that information and has the conversations with the client based on, do you know what, we need to, we probably need a bit more revenue, a bit more money from you for this because what we thought was going to be a fairly easy thing is a lot harder. Or the team have flagged that there's some real opportunity here if we do X, Y, Z for you to have a better outcome being found on Google or know, chat to UBT or something along those lines. So we try and make it so that they all have

a part to play within it and it all allows them to learn and train up for the next role. But again, like we said at the start, like when I said that I do believe that scheduling is one of the most important things you can do in a business, especially a creative agency to deliver good work. We're trying to teach people at an early stage that yes, you might be what's being delivered lead and it's not necessarily as not the step up on the account lead just yet, but what you're doing is very important and the more...

Ryan McNamara (25:41.66)

seriously as you take it, the better outcomes we'll get as a business. So that as they move up in the team, they understand what the expectations are.

Adam Cooper (25:51.263)

Got it. No, I love that. And I love the development flow through the three levels that you've got there, 'cause there's you know you know, talent and people are so important to agencies and the ability to retain through having those those three different levels seems critical. So no, I think that's that seems super super sort of well thought out. And speaking of people, we we mentioned we touched on it before about hiring and using utilisation

Ryan McNamara (26:01.704)

Hehe.

Adam Cooper (26:17.924)

as a as an indicator for hiring decisions. Can you can you tell us a little bit more about how your agencies do that? You you touched on it before, but just flesh that out a little bit in terms of how your your view utilisation as part of that hiring business case.

Ryan McNamara (26:32.777)

Sure, I I always view it as like almost smoke signals, like utilization and especially the future utilization because it doesn't necessarily mean you need to hire or there's issues, but it means you should probably go have a look and see what's causing that fire or that smoke. So that's how we use it in the case that Holly is, for instance, the other day she emailed that she'd seen that over the coming months we've got something in the cup of...

projects in the pipeline that are fairly close to being signed. If they do over the coming months, in a few months time we'll probably need a particular skill set to fulfill parts of those projects. So that is used, so that is ultimately starts conversation around do we have other parts of the team that could fulfill that instead or is there another way we could do that or actually...

probably is completely right and there needs to be another body in the team to ensure that we can deliver what's correct. So that's how it's used there and then we have bi-weekly syncs to talk through utilization, staff ratio, think people related.

that we have a bit more understanding as to what's coming and new business related. So anything that is coming up that might need a different skill set or someone's quite busy or there's some strain in the team elsewhere that we might need to consider, you know, is it a freelancer thing for a couple of months to get us over a hump or is it something that we do need to hire for because it's going to be a long-term pain. We try and join those dots up together as in the team and make some decisions at that point.

Adam Cooper (28:12.508)

Nice, nice. I like I like that. I like the smoke signals analogy as well. I think we've got our quote there for our for for the promo. I think it's a that's a lovely way of looking at it. yeah, just moving on slightly to I know you do some mentoring for for agency operations people, and as I mentioned we have sort of a number of smaller agency owners who listen to to the pod. So maybe it'd be good to get a f your view on a few lessons that you're, you know, seeing across the

Ryan McNamara (28:16.809)

Okay, good.

Ryan McNamara (28:32.489)

Okay.

Adam Cooper (28:41.138)

the industry that you would sort of pass on to smaller, younger agency founders. Yeah, what what advice would you give like for agency founders just starting out, starting to scale quickly, that they need to consider from an operations perspective?

Ryan McNamara (28:52.958)

Mm-hmm.

Ryan McNamara (28:56.689)

Yeah, think one of the things, I wouldn't say you need to hire an operations person straight away. I think one of the things I quite firmly believe in, and sometimes it's frowned upon when it comes to ops, is that I personally feel that a process comes last, because you just don't know what you don't know. And you don't know if you put a process on top of something that you're just figuring out.

it's just going to slow you down and it's going to stop adoption of that thing and get people, stop people from getting excited. And then also, apart from things that can be automated in terms of, you you do this, then you do this, and you do this, and you get very definite yes-no outcomes, everything needs to be guardrails instead of definite, this is what we do. So if you're...

For instance, I was going through, we actually have someone who's come back to Rise in the US team, which is great. They went elsewhere and they've come back over the last month or so and I was walking them through our new sort of commercial leader, leader, delivery leader process. And I made it very clear that everything in the documents and the training plan is there is a definitive outcome that we need. So this is what good looks like. The outcome is X. How do you get there?

can be different for each person because there are different constraints in every single account. There are different ways that each person likes to communicate. There are different ways each client likes to communicate. But we need to make sure that an email is sent about what we're doing next week by Friday at a certain time. These are the things you need to consider. How you go about writing that in your own style is your call. But this is the outcome that needs to happen. So we look at it from an outcomes basis, not really from a definite, you know.

ABC, this is what you should do. So I look at that first in that if you start putting process around a young agency, I think you're going to stifle growth, if I'm being honest. I would also try and get into a culture of planning as well as you possibly can fairly early on because that again is going to allow you to grow quicker and have a better visibility of the numbers quicker.

Ryan McNamara (31:08.253)

because you'll be able to see issues in the future because you might have resource constraints or you might realize that, God, we've allowed two people to go on holiday at the same time and they're integral to delivering this project and that's the deadline we've got to deliver on. So the better you plan, and again, it can be a Google shoot to begin with, but it just allows you to see into the future a bit more and give you some buffer for when things might get a bit tough.

And I would also say, and you'll probably enjoy this one, that understand the numbers as early on as you possibly can because otherwise you're... When I've done a couple of ops resets when I've been in businesses and you always start with the numbers because again, when it comes to process, when it comes to scheduling, all those things, if the numbers don't make sense and don't go in the right direction, why are you putting process around a business that is not going to be here in six months time?

Make sure you understand the numbers, understand what's happening, understand where you're going and what things, and that actually defines your priority list.

Adam Cooper (32:08.96)

love that. Love that, as you can imagine. Very good. so understanding the numbers. I'll go with that one first. put in place put in place the guardrails versus this is what you need to do and plan as well as you can. So that's three great lessons there. So no, I that's that's brilliant. And just changing tack and moving on to what I call our business book bonus section. So this is where we ask our guest if there's a book or a podcast or a piece of content that's really influenced.

Ryan McNamara (32:12.144)

Yeah, okay.

Ahem. Ahem.

Ryan McNamara (32:31.591)

Mm-hmm.

Adam Cooper (32:37.16)

How you think about work or professionally that you would recommend to the listeners. So, yeah, Ryan, what would you like to recommend to the audience today?

Ryan McNamara (32:39.751)

Thank

Ryan McNamara (32:46.018)

I've got a few. I do like reading. That sounds really bizarre, But not as in like the way I phrase that. But yeah, I do love a business book. I think there's a few, few ones I would recommend. When I was a designer, I loved the book called Design as a Job by Mike Monterio. He is a guy in the States who runs a company called Mule Design. He's a bit of a no bullshit sort of person and it's...

all built around the idea that design isn't just, you know, pretty pictures and paint by numbers, it's a job and it has a huge value to what we're, you know, what you're offering to the world. I think that's becoming more more prevalent in the age of AI and things becoming very, very similar. that design is a job and it's a creative thought process and strategy, I think it's well worth having a read. When it comes to operations, there are two books that I love.

Adam Cooper (33:35.442)

Okay.

Ryan McNamara (33:44.937)

There is the Phoenix Project, which is all about IT operations and, sound a bit sad, it is a novel, but it's written in a way, and I probably read it once a year, and again, that sounds quite sad, but it's all about how operations and within IT, within the businesses can really make...

huge difference to the overall structure and profitability of a business. And that was inspired by a book called The Goal by Goldratt, I think his name was. Again, he was like the godfather of operations and how you do this within factories and various different things like the Toyota production line systems and stuff. And he wrote about it first.

Again, a novel around how to improve factory operations, but it sounds like the, when I say factory operations, it sounds like how can you apply that to, you know, actual creative industries? As soon as you read it, you'll understand in terms of understanding workloads on people and teams and skill sets within individual teams and factories and how you can actually make a difference by just changing up how you deliver something in order for you to actually deliver better work and

high volume of work to clients. And the last one is Radical Candor. I think it's a great book on how to deliver good feedback to people, especially when you're moving up through the ranks in a business. I think it's really well written. It shows that you don't have to be an asshole to deliver hard feedback, but it needs to be constructive and you can actually make a big difference to people personally and professionally just by

doing the kind thing and giving them feedback in a way that they can grow from it. I think it's a difficult thing for a lot of people, a lot of people shut away from giving difficult feedback. But again, the quicker you do it, it's just small, know, it's like tailing a ship, isn't it? Like you can wait until everything's going terribly wrong when it takes a long time to change behaviors and change systems. But if you continually just tweak that steering wheel as you're going by giving feedback consistently,

Ryan McNamara (36:00.84)

you'll go so much faster in the long run.

Adam Cooper (36:02.708)

Hmm. That's brilliant. Okay, four good books there. We don't usually get four, so I appreciate that, right? That's that's and and all in different areas. So no, that's really good. So we'll put links, links to those in the show notes. And that's pretty much it. So before we wrap up, is there anything that we haven't covered that you think founders, operators, the audience should understand? And if not, where can people find out more about what you're doing and what Rise is doing?

Ryan McNamara (36:06.056)

Yeah.

Ryan McNamara (36:26.92)

I post a lot on Rize posts a lot on LinkedIn. I try and use it as a way to get my thoughts out there, not to say I'm always right, and I've definitely shifted my perspectives over the years, but LinkedIn is probably the best place to sort of catch me and sort of chat with me. I think the thing that we're really looking at at the moment is, like most, is the impact of AI and how that is on the quality of the work. Like we're really trying to make sure that

We don't lose people because of it, but actually empower them to do better work quicker and then use it to enhance their strategy, their thinking, because that's the important part. That's why they're at Rise at 7. And also just building process in teams and systems with the platforms to make us quicker and more profitable.

Adam Cooper (37:16.692)

Mm-hmm. Perfect. Okay. Well we'll we'll put link through to your LinkedIn profile in in in the show notes as well. And you know, thank you so much for joining me today on the Fractional CFO show, Ryan. It's been very interesting and really appreciate your insight, your perspective and your time. Thank you.

Ryan McNamara (37:29.052)

They're preppy.

Ryan McNamara (37:33.329)

No problem. Thank very much for having me.

Adam Cooper (37:36.959)

Okay.