Alright Studio - Upsourced

AGENCY TYPE: Design Studio

LOCATION: Brooklyn, New York

COMPANY SIZE: 10 Employees

A fast-growing studio looking to expand sustainably with data-backed decisions.

About The Client

Alright Studio is a full-service strategy, creative, production, and technology agency. With no house style or allegiance to medium or method, they can do it all.

When Alright came to Upsourced, they were a successful and growing studio. Yet they lacked visibility into the profitability of the business. This limitation kept Alright from feeling empowered to hire with confidence. The key question to answer was, could they continue to grow and hire at a sustainable rate that didn’t put the business at risk?

“Upsourced does an outstanding job speaking agency language and understanding what we are dealing with.”

Spencer Joynt

Partner

Our Process

Upsourced met with the Alright leadership team to establish a foundation for the studio’s sustainable growth. The Upsourced team better understood their key challenges and inhibitors to scale and offered solutions. Upsourced implemented new reporting and processes to record revenue targets and cash flow. These changes created a more predictable process for forecasting revenue, profit, and cash, allowing the Alright leadership team to act with certainty and remove themselves from daily tasks.

How We Helped

Helped Alright to implement time tracking across the service team and gain accurate visibility into project profitability and real-time capacity.
Added steps to Alright invoicing and bill pay workflows to gain predictable insights into cash flow.
Set up a new process for tracking projects, allowing more precise revenue insights and project margins.
Provided consulting services to manage sustainable growth and keep the Alright leadership team aligned on their goals.

“Upsourced is like having a work therapist – someone that can be there when things feel dire to remind us and help us dig out of the hole and find a solution – while also reminding us when we’re succeeding and doing well.”

Spencer Joynt

Partner

Overall Improvement

As the Alright leadership team aligned on their company goals, it became easier to empower staff to own day-to-day tasks. In turn, this enabled leadership to focus on growing the studio.

By creating an annual financial plan and maintaining comfort about the future, the Alright leadership team went from funding payroll with their personal accounts, to giving themselves their first salary increase in three years. No longer was Alright staffing based on gut-feel and hope. Instead, they maintained certainty on each new scope and client delivery.

“It’s nice to have a third party analyze the data, remind us that we’re much further along than we were a year ago, and help us appreciate our wins.”

As a specialist in creative agencies, Upsourced has a firm grip on the common challenges and pitfalls of the professional service model. If you want to read more on our POV when it comes to running a great agency, check out our 4-stage guide on the Life Cycle of Agencies.