How Tight Line Streamlined Its Project Management Processes with Rodeo
Location: Melbourne, Florida
Employees: 10
Using Rodeo: Since August 2020
Meet Tight Line, a full-service advertising agency based in Melbourne, Florida, which specializes in delivering unique marketing solutions to businesses of all kinds.
Video projects are one of Tight Line’s main service offerings, which includes TV commercials, corporate videos, as well as website videos. Tight Line works with a wide range of clients, from the Kennedy Space Center to Health First, a local hospital in Melbourne.
But when working with projects of all different sizes, coordinating budgets, sending estimates as well as sending and managing invoices was a large undertaking for Tight Line — one that many software tools fail to successfully help with.
THE PROBLEM
Existing software solutions were clunky and flawed
Before using Rodeo, DeMalia tried several other project management software tools. But ultimately, these platforms didn’t meet his team’s exact needs, and it felt like they were constantly trying to find workarounds that made these solutions useable for their organization.
“We struggled with a lot of different ‘organizational’ websites. All of them had flaws and were clunky. They had massive hiccups that were almost insurmountable,” says Anthony DeMalia, Video Production Manager at Tight Line.
DeMalia also found that a lot of project management tools require users to hire someone with professional expertise to help with onboarding and managing their accounts, which presented yet another obstacle to actually getting work done.
“We were looking for something a little bit more simplistic, something we could train people on, something that I could sit down with somebody and within an hour actually have them contribute their time to,” says DeMalia.
In other words — Tight Line was looking for a solution that was easy to use without sacrificing the features they needed.
THE SOLUTION
Adopting Rodeo to meet their project and financial management needs
When Tight Line began using Rodeo, they found that the platform fixed most of the issues they were having with other software solutions. This allowed them to ditch workarounds and the need to use multiple tools to cover all phases of a project’s lifecycle.
Since Rodeo is a financials-focused project management platform, its robust set of features allowed the Tight Line team to keep their project activities organized and on schedule — even when juggling multiple projects and clients at once — without losing track of project spend.
“One of the things I love best about Rodeo is that it easily accommodates all of those clients on a huge spectrum. I’m able to break down huge projects on a massive scale, or I can take small and simple projects and coordinate those really easily. Rodeo accommodates both flawlessly,” says DeMalia.
When you create a new project in Rodeo, you’re prompted to create a budget. From there, you’ll add the phases of your project, along with the time and expense activities you expect to incur under each phase. For a video production project, these phases might be your pre-production, production, and post-production stages.
The project budget also includes an overview of your budget metrics, which include your time, expenses, revenue, and the amount you’ve invoiced. These metrics update in real-time to show you exactly how much of your budget you’ve used compared to the amount you have left.
This breakdown of your budget makes it easy to visualize and monitor your team’s progress. And if a client asks for a status update, you’ll immediately know the exact number of hours your team has spent on project activities, for example.
Tight Line has found that this approach to project finances simplified the process of anticipating expenses ahead of time. Additionally, budgets in Rodeo automatically update as users track their hours within the platform, making it easier than ever to monitor progress on specific projects and client accounts.
Plus, Tight Line discovered that, unlike other software tools, Rodeo wasn’t unnecessarily complex. DeMalia was especially impressed by the simplicity of the budgeting, invoicing, and estimating features, he said.
“It’s been a number of years since we started using Rodeo and I really wouldn’t look anywhere else. Every time I log onto Rodeo, it’s absolutely smooth. It’s detailed, it’s thorough, and it’s easy enough to follow along,” DeMalia added.
THE RESULTS
Efficient project management, without the hassle
Since switching to Rodeo, Tight Line has seen its project processes become streamlined and more efficient. Rodeo has helped the team:
- Build phased budgets that account for every time and expense the project will incur.
- Send customizable estimates to clients directly from Rodeo, based on the budget they’ve created.
- Track their team’s billable hours via the time-tracking feature. The value of the team’s time is then reflected in their real-time budget metrics.
- Invoice clients for work completed.
- Onboard new employees in a matter of minutes, without the need for costly professional onboarding training.
See how Rodeo can change your business by signing up for a free trial today — no credit card required.
