Timesheets: are they a waste of time? Darryl Sparey vs Andy West

Tony Garner  00:00

This is a Viva podcast.

Darryl Sparey  00:08

Timesheets aren’t management data, right? They’re a simulacrum of management data. They’re a confection.

Andy West  00:15

Counting clients tells you how many plates are spinning, but it doesn’t tell you how heavy those plates are.

Darryl Sparey  00:21

You can’t prove that I’m wrong.

Andy West  00:24

If you remove timesheets and you don’t remove the cost of time, you just remove the visibility of it.

Darryl Sparey  00:30

We don’t sell time. We sell results.

Tony Garner  00:30

Hello, and welcome to PR in the Real World, we’ve got a special today and we’re going to look at timesheets. But before we all switch off, I think it should be. Stay tuned because I think it should be an interesting one. We’ve got we’ve actually got our first ever PR in the Real World debate. So we’ve got a in the red corner, Darryl Sparey from [Hard Numbers] and in the blue corner Andy West from West of Center. And and these two guys know one another. But so it should be a friendly fight. But we’re going to look at whether you can run a profitable PR agency without timesheets. And and people really understand the profitability of an agency without accurately tracking where people’s time going. So, that’s their ado. Let’s get into it and have a bit of a fact. Darryl, you’ve described timesheets rather provocatively as a waste of time. And Andy, you’ve argued that they’re essential to managing a profitable agency. So, one of us is right. Yeah. So, Darryl, we’ll start with you. What’s the fundamental flaw in Andy’s argument?

Darryl Sparey  01:50

I’m going to go to philosophy to answer this question, if I can. There are two strings, two streams to philosophy. Really? If you take it all the way back to Aristotle and Plato, that is a priori, right, or, or rationalism, basically through logic, through something being a good idea. That is the thing we should do. And then you’ve got a posteriori or empiricism, through experience. I know this to be true. I have never met an external consultant like Andy, who I love and respect greatly, who doesn’t think that timesheets are a good thing. I have rarely met an agency owner who thinks they’re a good thing. Right? So what we’ve got is this clash between the, the the, the kind of out of are being removed from the, the day to day the, the, the, the fog of war that is managing an agency thinking they’re a good idea and the actual on the ground experience of trying to corral 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 people on a monthly basis to fill in what they spent the last month. Doing. That, in essence, is one pillar to my argument. The second pillar to my argument is, and I think we probably agree on this, is that we cannot, as an industry, continue to sell time. And the reasons for that is one, AI and, you know, technology will increasingly automate, you know, what we do. But two, there is no innovation incentive in a business that sells its services by the time it takes to deliver, because if it took me ten hours and three people to do something last month, and with technology and automation, I can spend less time in the doing and more time in the thinking and the strategy and the client relationships and making it a better thing. I have I can’t put that on the I can’t put that on the timesheet. I can’t I can’t recall that because I’m going to make less money this month than I made than I made last month. So those are the kind of two core pillars of my arguments. I’m sure we will get into the weeds and disagree on this a little bit more.

Tony Garner  04:09

So Andy, your chance to to fight back.

Andy West  04:12

Well, I mean, I’m going to open up by saying I feel bloodied. How can I possibly argue against the two pillars of philosophy with a man like like Darryl? I’ve got to confess, I wasn’t expecting to be fazed by Plato and Aristotle and other long words that are way beyond my intellectual capacity. So, Fair play. I feel like I’m staggering back onto the ropes a bit straight away. But no, I mean, I think fundamentally, Darryl and I agree on more than we disagree. I mean, we both believe fervently and passionately that agencies agencies should be measured on outcomes and not on [hours], that a fundamental principle. We both believe that value pricing beats hourly pricing. We both believe, as Darryl’s just said, that AI should increase efficiency, not reduce agency value. So I think the real debate isn’t about whether agencies should necessarily understand resource consumption. You already do that, Darryl. Within Hard Numbers, the real debate is whether agencies should collect that information systematically or rely on retrospective estimates and judgment. And I think that’s the crux of my argument. What timesheets are are management data that allows for better decisions in running the agency. By understanding where your core unit of currency is going. And if you don’t understand where that core unit of currency is going, how can you manage your your core units, your people and understand how profitable each engagement, each outcome that you’ve generated really is to the agency? So that would be the core of my argument.

Tony Garner  06:06

So, Darryl, you’ve said that you asked your staff to roughly estimate a proportion of their time spent on client work. Is that right? Yeah. So and and is that not just a timesheet in, in, in another form is.

Andy West  06:22

In a in a nutshell, Tony. Absolutely. And that’s one of the arguments that I would present to Darryl is, you know, you’re arguing that you don’t use timesheets and then you turn around and say, well, every sort of once every six weeks or so, you’ll look back and I my question is, how then do you understand how how much time did it take to deliver the outcome? And I understand that you use HubSpot as a CRM. Yeah. But you know, the you know, the answer to the problem is not the fact that it’s bad data, it or no data. It’s how do we get better data to be able to better understand where our resources are going and what the what the profitability on each account truly and really is.

Darryl Sparey  07:07

Yeah. This is where the rubber hits the road on all of this. Right. Because for there’s some research that Peter [Czapp] from [The Wow Company] put out this morning, my partner Rachel would tell me off if I didn’t say that other finance agencies and management accountancy firms for creative services businesses are available like [Magic Digits], timesheets. They said that 54% I think it was of agency owners use timesheets. And then there are if you added them up, about 34% of agencies use them either partly or mostly. Right. The 34%, they were telling the truth. The fact is, with timesheets, I love the fact that Andy said management data, right? Because as a well-read, philosophical man like he is, he would be familiar with Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra and simulation, right? Timesheets aren’t management data, right? They’re a simulacrum of management data. They’re a confection, right. Because if what happened in the agency that we both worked in previously. And that’s not to throw shade at anyone at that agency, but it’s just a fact. At the end of every month, 50% of the business had not filled in a timesheet. So then for the next month, the accounts department spent a huge amount of time chasing everyone around the building, right? To basically get them to fill in timesheets, right? That is an inordinate waste of time, money and resources in the accountancy function, and they could be doing much better things as a business. It’s also a waste of people’s time because ultimately what they’re then doing is just recording information like retrospectively but in detail, like in 15 minute units or hourly based units of what they’re doing. All we ask our team to do is every couple of months say how much as a percentage of your time. One question right across their clients are you spending on each of your individual clients? Because the real management data that we get that helps us manage our business on a, on a daily, weekly, monthly basis is the information that we abstract from people just using the HubSpot widget to input all of what they’re doing into HubSpot automatically, so we can see which clients are keeping us busy in terms of inbound and outbound kind of responses, who we’ve got the best media relationships with, because all of those, you know, interactions with media are logged in our database and all the other stuff that we log in there as well automatically. That’s the bit that we run our business on the, the, the bi monthly, you know, quick check we do is simply a, it’s another source of data to help us reconcile against the primary source of data we use a bit like in market research. Right. You’ve got quantitative research and qualitative research. The the issue that many agencies make is they use what is effectively qualitative data like it’s quantitative data. We’re using qualitative data qualitatively I yield the floor to my learned colleague.

Andy West  10:14

Again you I’m going to have to say I’m going to throw this back at you. What a show off. Again. You’ve been trained.

Darryl Sparey  10:25

Worse Andy.

Andy West  10:27

I know I’m by me many times. No. Look, I think the,

Tony Garner  10:31

For my wife listening to this show, okay?

Andy West  10:33

That’s why I. Yes. So, look, I think again, here’s where we violently agree. Timesheets can be a waste of time, right? Bad timesheets are worse than no timesheets, because, as we saw in our in our previous lives together. You know, when you’ve got too many codes where they’re completed too late, where they’re overly detailed, and most importantly, where they’re never analysed. And the point I’d also add on to that is where leadership doesn’t follow the model. And one of the biggest challenges that I see when I speak to agencies that do use timesheets, and I will counter your argument to say, over the last five years I’ve worked with probably two dozen agencies, both below the 1 million mark in Peter’s benchmark and above the 1 million mark. And I’ve had some very positive experiences with agencies that use timesheets to help them manage their profitability, to help them understand where their people’s time is going, in order to help those individuals manage their time better, in order to be able to identify scope creep and what is causing scope creep. And also, and I think critically, to understand where the non billable time is going, because one of the biggest challenges, I think, a lack of management data presents is that when an individual or a team or an agency is working under capacity, they’re not recovering the number of hours that they could possibly sell. What happens? Well, I’ll tell you what happens. The individual, the team or the agency provides work essentially for free to fill those hours, meaning a drop in profitability. So I think that, you know, there is it’s not a criticism at a time, data, what I come back to with timesheets, if people are not filling them in, it’s a combination of poor leadership and badly designed systems. Now, I think the way that you run your business is really interesting, and I think you are an outlier, a very, very successful outlier in a sea of normality.

Darryl Sparey  12:55

Just in a very polite way.

Andy West  12:58

Well, you and I both know that I’m a huge fan of HubSpot. Other CRM and PR management systems do do exist. And so I think the way that you run your business, which is built around the hub stop HubSpot, the HubSpot platform, is very, very unusual. I’ve not met any other agency that has invested so much. There may have been one. I know that an agency in America called [Highwire] who just they ran their business actually on on Salesforce. I believe I may be wrong in that. And if anybody from HubSpot does listen to this from [Highwire], do come and tell me. But running your business on a CRM in the way that you do is an exception and not the norm. So the majority of PR agencies that I’ve worked with, and I would advise, I would always say, find the right system, design it in a way that creates minimal friction. Yeah. Make sure that your leadership is using it as much as the most junior account executive, but critically use the data to help you manage profitability. Help you understand what you’re doing with each client, where the over servicing is happening, where the under servicing is happening. The corollary is true. You know, you want to be able to spot and you know, where a team maybe has taken their eye off this client because they’re maxed out with this client, because this client has got a major launch this month, and it’s this sort of insight that the only a good resource management system can provide, because I think the point I would make is I think timesheets suffer from the term timesheets. Right. If we moved away from the term timesheet and said, actually, this is how we manage our resources, this is how we manage exactly what we’re what we’re doing day to day. This is how we ensure that we’re creating or building profitable outcomes for our clients at a profit. That means something to us. This is how we’re working in AI. You can’t do any of that unless you’ve got an eye on the data. And your point is absolutely right. If people are going back a month later and going, oh, it was about that in a 15 minute increment, you are plus or -50 or 60% accurate, 100% agree with you there. And that’s why. And in our previous agency there were people who didn’t do it. Yeah. And finance did.

Darryl Sparey  15:23

Ten years.

Andy West  15:25

And finance did run around to get people. But I would say that over a period of time, as we as we started to demonstrate the value of understanding where time was going and where finance actually came back and said, hold on a minute, Andy and the X team, I won’t name the client. You’re consistently over servicing by 40 or 50%. Let’s have a discussion about that. Because your team is stretched, your team is stressed. We can see on paper that there’s capacity, but they’re telling us we need to hire more. Where are you going to base that decision on gut feel, or are you going to base that decision on data, in fact. And that, for me, is the key reason why having that management information accurately is an absolute must. And you can’t rely on a gut feel six weeks later to say roughly what percentage of our time we’re spending on those clients, because that is a that is an art. It is not a science, and the science of business is profitability.

Tony Garner  16:26

Well, points off there. And if we’re not mentioning any philosophers at all, but it is this is this really a debate then, about whether to manage time and measure time are really about how accurately and frequently we actually do that?

Darryl Sparey  16:43

I would like to I, I think that I think we cannot divorce the commercial model selling time right from the activity or the management or the capturing of time. My contention would be and look, I agree, I really wanted to come onto this, this podcast, Tony, and vehemently disagree with Andy to make this really entertaining. And I will try and throw some.

Andy West  17:12

You’ve done that just by throwing philosophy at us from all corners, my man. I mean.

Darryl Sparey  17:17

You nearly called me Kant or something similar. Andy.

Tony Garner  17:22

No, no.

Darryl Sparey  17:23

So so I would say, the reason, actually, if you put a gun to the head of most agency owners, which is something I hope you never have to do, Andy, they they will probably say that the reason they capture time isn’t ultimately to better manage their business and understand why their time is spending. If they were really honest, they’d say, we have to track time this way because that’s the we, you know, our clients at the end of the month want to see our timesheets and they want to go through. Right. And they want to say how much time they spent on this stuff and all the rest of it. And there are particular clients in particular sectors and in particular markets that the teams will pour over, you know, timesheets and then nickel and dime the businesses on. Did that take that long? Should that have been all the rest of it? Right. So my contention is because we don’t track time and we never do when we have an instance with a client that says, we would like you to fill in the timesheet, or that we’re in a process, and they ask us to give us the billable hours or any of that stuff. We say no right now. Occasionally that loses us business. There’s one piece of business that we lost in our first two years, because I wasn’t used to convincing people of there being a better way. And I’ve, I’m a I’m a work in progress. And every day I get better at what I do. I’ve learned since then. And so there was a very large FTSE 100 company that we worked with, a couple of years ago, where I managed to convince the communications team and the procurement team, despite the fact that they procured every other agency service they bought on, on an hourly rate, that we weren’t going to be bought in that way, that we were going to be bought on a retainer that equated to deliverables and all the rest of it. So my my point is, because we don’t track time, we can’t track time, so we won’t sell our services by the time they take [to] deliver. And we never in that, that issue of the client, going through all those kind of things that I, I spoke about. Right. We, we ultimately have found a better commercial model as an agency. And our job is just to where in the instances where, you know, businesses do need a bit convincing, I’d obviously convince them that are ways the better way.

Andy West  19:49

Yeah. And you’ll be disappointed, Tony, to hear that, I agree with quite a lot of what Darryl has just said. Because, look, you know, we this industry knows that, you know, if we continue to, price by the hour, exactly as Darryl says, procurement comes in and they pour over those hours and they nickel and dime. And then the you know, there’s sort of the existential threat that AI is, you know, is presenting us all with. They’re going to they are already saying to, you know, to the industry, well, hold on a minute. Why is it taking that much time when it’s actually using AI? So it’s only taking that much time? So I think the first fundamental principle, which is bigger than this debate is, you know, the industry, which I think increasingly is needs to embrace a a form of value based pricing. You need to value the outcome because by building value based pricing, you are essentially building in the experience that you bring to the table. You’re building in the reputation of the agency. You’re building in a the the case studies you’re building in the team. That’s all great. So you can go out and you can provide a price to a prospect or a client to say, this job, this, this outcome is going to cost you this 100% agree. And I whenever agencies whenever I talk to agencies about how they price, how they scope the advice is always as best you can. Do not share the hours you have allocated to that job for those very reasons. And as Darryl rightly says, there are there are clients who want to see it. There are procurement departments that want to see it. And it’s an agency’s decision whether to take a stand, as Darryl did, and my previous agency did as well. By the way, we didn’t used to reveal the hours when asked to buy procurement. We pushed back and we had some good language that we used in order to assuage the procurement department to back off. That’s all great, but what you do need to do internally, and let’s bring this to a really focus to the internal management of an agency. What is it that we have as the I hate to sort of bring it this to a sort of a to a sort of a mechanical basis. But our raw materials are the hours that our people deliver to create an outcome. If we don’t know how many, how much raw material has been used in order to drive that outcome, we don’t know that whether that 10,000 pound projects has taken 10,000 pounds worth of time internally, 5000 pounds or 2000 pounds. We can’t then look at how we’re delivering those those services, delivering those solutions and those outcomes, whether that is, you know, have we found a repeatable process? Have we, you know, how have we looked at AI to use it? How do we basically systemised the delivery of our services in the best way possible to optimise the productivity, the the profitability and the productivity of our people? And if we don’t understand where time is going and how are we going to measure when it’s time to actually hire a new person? Now you can do that in a rough sense. You know, you look at gross margin. That is a rough measure of, you know, what? It looks like we’re overheating because our revenue to staff cost is getting in the sort of the dangerous range. I think Darryl has said that, you know, you look at the number of clients that are that an individual is working on. And again, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. That is a rough measure of saying, actually, we have an average client retainer of X, ICP or ideal client profile is this this person is currently working on five accounts. Therefore they’ve got either capacity for one more or actually they’re at capacity. Or you know, maybe we need to move an account on. Those are all good general measures, but they’re relying on judgment, which Darryl has in spades. I’ll give him that. But they don’t rely on data. The only way you can accurately manage your resources to understand where the pinch points are, where there is a requirement to hire, or indeed to downsize because you’re over capacity and you’re having too much, you’re too much insufficient revenue. And if you bring it down to a micro level and you look and this is something I work on with all of my agencies, is if you look at forward capacity modeling, planning, how many hours have we got next month to deliver the work that we’ve got under contract? Well, that depends on who’s on holiday. How do you manage the resources if you, you know, you if you think. Okay, well, John over here has got 60 hours available next month, but actually Sarah over here has only got 20 because she’s on holiday for two weeks. Does that mean that her 20 hours are going to go over to John, who’s now over capacity now? Yes. In a smaller agency, you can do that by sitting around a table and having a chat hundred percent the sub 1 million pound agencies. But I think you say yourself in one of your blogs or one of your replies, Darryl, as you grow to become a 2 million, a 3 million, a 5 million scale deserves systems. Systems are not a drag on a on scale very or agility very much the obvious opposite systems unlock agility because they give you the data to be able to move fast, and I think that would be one of my main arguments. Smaller agencies, yes, you can do it by a combination of judgment and gut feel, sitting around a table and having a conversation. No problem with that. You go above a certain size and that goes out the window because there are too many variables that are going to influence it.

Tony Garner  25:42

You mentioned it earlier in, in the piece, over servicing in under service. And and it’s not those are phrases that Darryl hasn’t used at all. One Darryl of you abolished that as well as timesheets. Or do not just not know whether you’re over servicing.

Darryl Sparey  26:01

But you know, but you just know in a different way. Like, I suppose my look, a lot of what Andy says is, is right. I suppose our big point of differences, I don’t think you need to get everyone in the agency to track their time, right in the way that timesheets have traditionally been. conceptualised and, and managed to get to those data points. So we used to have a very complicated spreadsheet, which we’ve now built into an app that exists on our, on a, on our intranet or an internal internal facing website with a login, blah, blah, blah. The basic does all of the things that Andy says. So we basically pull from HubSpot, all of our, and then revenue schedule it out. So like, you know, in each month, how much revenue are we going to make from each client? We then got our people data in there as well. And Andy’s giving me a good idea because we’ve got our CharlieHR, which we pay for at the moment. There’s a separate system. We’ll just do away with that. Right. And we’ll bring the holiday booking thing into that platform as well, so we can then put in the holiday hours as well all the time or who’s who’s here, who’s not right. But basically it’s called out. It used to be called our resource planner. It was like v6, but we iterated it so many times to kind of, do this, but now we’ve got it in and out. So but all of the information that Andy is talking about there. Right. Revenue per head, revenue per client, you know, like breaking it down. You know, we have metrics that we use in terms of the average number of clients that we want our team to be on the average revenue per head, we want our team to be on, and then we can allocate it because we know who works on the different clients. Right. And using that time based retina that I talked about, we can compare that with our HubSpot data to say, okay, well, how busy are these clients making us? So all of those things that Andy is saying you need timesheets for, we’ve got we just use a different way to get them. And the key thing is the, the way that we go about getting them is as light as, as possible in terms of overhead on anyone in the business. So no one has to remember to record anything. Also isn’t in the realms of like, surveillance, which I’ve seen some time tracking tools that basically sit on your desktop as an app. And I’m like, I don’t think everyone’s going to want to use those, right. So I’m like, I think it’s it sits in a sweet spot between the level of, you know, not being only for people to to capture their information about what they’re spending their time doing, but giving us enough visibility now and in the future to plan our business effectively. I just think, you know, we’re living in the past if if we’re going to ask people to, you know, manually record units of and I don’t know if I don’t think Andy is necessarily making this argument, but there are because Andy is in the I support timesheets camp. Many, many agency owners out there who are struggling with the I am currently recording time. I don’t really want to be doing this. None of our staff want us to do this, but I’m doing this because our, you know, the way we operate with our clients, mandates that I have to do this. And I just think there’s a better way and, you know, and and, you know, to Andy’s point, we’ve scaled to nearly 2 million turnover. Now by next year we should be 2 million turnover. Ask me again in the year, two years time when we’re 3 million turnover. Whether whether my model works or not. But, but it’s got us this far. I love these point systems about systems and scaling.

Andy West  29:48

Their systems and agility systems unlock agility, which help you to scale.

Darryl Sparey  29:52

Yeah, systems helps help scale. Right. But we built systems from the day we started. So we were we were built on HubSpot from the day we started. When I started the agency, one of the things I did is if I found myself doing something more than once, I’d write a process document because I thought, one day I’m going to have to. Probably soon I’m going to have to hire someone to do this right, so get it done. Now, obviously I can just chuck Fireflies or another, you know, AI tool to record what I’m doing, chuck it into Claude and it can write produce a process document for me. It can start to automate the boring bits that I don’t want to do. We can start to build agentic workflows around this stuff again, you know, not to produce content, not to do any of that strategy, not to do any high value stuff for clients, but boring grunt work, moving data in and out of databases, cleaning it up, making sure it’s accurate, but all that kind of stuff, all those workflows we can we can automate.

Andy West  30:46

Yeah.

Tony Garner  30:47

So you’re not saying it’s the it’s the physical and manual work of of filling in timesheets, but you, you do measure time as part of the whole overall management strategy. You do understand that. Yes. And you can’t.

Darryl Sparey  31:04

I wouldn’t say time like not units of time but yes, activity and results. How many people are available to do something.

Andy West  31:12

So I think that, you know, I think, you know, what I find very interesting is, you know, I think you’ve basically what you describe is, is resource management, you know, in another way. So I think, you know, we are arguing the same point. As I said earlier, you know, I think the biggest problems timesheets have got is that they are called timesheets. I think what Hard Numbers has done, has by using the CRM, and by using some of these other metrics, that’s how you’re managing the agency. And we won’t go into it here because it’s commercially, you know, confidential information. But I think for me, and it was it was the basis of my agency advisory newsletter, Quick Plug. If nobody’s subscribed, please do. The the issue this week talks about, you know, you might be, you know, are you growing or are you just getting busier. And I think there is a very strong argument that says if you just look at your top line, you know, and you just look at revenue growth, that’s one thing. But how much of that revenue is dropping down to the bottom line? And the only way that you can really manage that accurately is by knowing how much resource it is taking to deliver that revenue, because if you don’t have the data, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of hiring against the revenue in a team or an agency that actually does have spare capacity. It’s just that they’re over servicing the accounts. So the team is very busy. But actually, if they were aware of where that over servicing is happening and more importantly, why and what can be done about it that releases capacity to take on new business, it means that your revenue growth at the top line are bigger. Percentage of that drops to the bottom line. And at a time when more and more agencies are struggling with the bottom line, that is a really critical piece of agency management, you know, so I think, you know, if you if you just do it by counting clients, counting clients tells you how many plates are spinning, but it doesn’t tell you how heavy those plates are. Right. So you’ve got to understand it. You’ve got to understand how much resource did it take to deliver that piece of coverage or that outcome. And, you know, the CRM can tell you that you’ve done it, but it doesn’t tell you how long it took, how much resource did it take to deliver that activity. And that’s the fundamental sort of premise of my argument. Everything Darryl is doing, everything that, you know, the way that you’ve structured the business around HubSpot, you know, I think, you know, as I said, you are an outlier. But if you want to match revenue growth with profitability improvement, you absolutely have to understand where are your resources going and how are you managing those resources, and what data are you making resource decisions on. And you can’t do that by looking at the number of clients or the CRM or anything that isn’t measuring the effort of that goes into the and the resources that go into delivering the service. That would be my, my, my, my promise.

Darryl Sparey  34:36

I don’t just want to sit here and agree with Andy. I want to go on and.

Andy West  34:42

Call it honorable draw.

Darryl Sparey  34:44

Okay, I said, I came here for a shoot out. So. Yeah. Look, we look, we agree on a lot, right? My, And thank you for the kind words, Andy. I, I suppose my contention would be, agencies need to find that alternate system. If we think that the, like, timesheet. Like, if timesheets have a bad rap. And there’s another way of doing things, and it doesn’t have to be my way. But of course, you know, for other other people, as Andy has more politely than this said, more than once, I’m a weirdo. But, but, I think the, the focusing on the kind of agency advisory world. Right. And it isn’t a criticism of you personally, Andy, but sort of in general or anyone in that space consulting with agencies or whatever, continually saying timesheets, timesheets, timesheets, timesheets. If you read Neil [surname TBC]’s book. I got bored reading that right, because I think it was basically one chapter about how to do PR and eight chapters about timesheets.

Andy West  35:57

I was waiting for the Khan because I. Read your. Read your quotes and then you linked to Genghis Khan. I mean, you know, it’s.

Darryl Sparey  36:06

I meant, yeah, I made a joke that the. Providence of timesheets was Genghis Khan when he conquered most of Asia. Used to capture his prisoners and then in minute detail, get them to transcribe what they’d spent the previous week doing that. You can’t prove that I’m wrong. So, yeah, I, I think that, you know, if, like, I think it would be great if the agency advisory consulting industry as is, could help the PR industry, the, you know, the people actually in the weeds doing the stuff, move things along and find that better model. And I think if they could find a model that divorces systematically actual units of time spent on something and systematically move towards outcomes or objectives based, work, they would then be doing the PR industry generally an enormous favour.

Andy West  37:13

I think I’ll close on this, Tony, but because I think, you know, I can see where the time is going. But but I mean, I think, you know, if we could find a way in which the world is not measured in, in, you know, hours, minutes and seconds, I would agree with you. Darryl, but I think I think that’s probably beyond even US agency advisors and, you know, the agency advisory community, we are all about one thing, and that is helping our clients improve their, well, both grow top line and most importantly, improve their bottom line. And, you know, I don’t think this this this debate is not about timesheets. It’s it’s not about outcomes. Basically, every agency needs to understand both the value it creates for its clients. And we’ve both been, you know, big parts of [AMEC]. And we, you know, measurement is very important to us. And the clues in the name of Hard Numbers, from where I sit, it, it’s about the value we create as an agent, as an agency for our clients and the resources it consumes to enable us to do that. So outcomes tells us what success has happened. Time, data, however it is captured, tells us what it costs and whether we can repeat it sustainably. If you remove timesheets and you don’t remove the cost of time, you just remove the visibility of it. And the only thing that we sell at the end of the day is time. And we have to understand in whatever form, internally, that’s how we manage the raw materials of the outcomes that we generate for our clients.

Tony Garner  38:50

Darryl.

Darryl Sparey  38:51

Final. Yeah. Final rebuttal. And Andy, I’ve really enjoyed the playful, intelligent and thoughtful spirit of this debate. We’ve disagreed agreeably, and I really enjoyed that. And you made me think about a couple of things. Actually, you’ve given me some food for thought in terms of better tracking, making that connection between holiday time and resourcing. I think that’s great. And a couple of other things you’ve said. I’ve made some notes for us to build into our systems and processes ultimately, I think and I love that Andy talked about value because in an agency there’s grunt work and there’s front work, right? And in an increasingly AI enabled, you know, automation, [agentic] world in which we, we live in. We’re going to we’re going to need to and want to spend less time on grunt work. Right? So the boring stuff that’s just moving data between different databases or, you know, putting one thing from one place and putting it over there or putting spreadsheets together or whatever that is, to much more meaningful work, valuable front work strategy, client relations, genuinely building meaningful media relationships, not just spam pitching journalists, all those things that genuinely create value within PR agencies. I believe that if the business model is built on selling time, right, there’s an inbuilt issue with moving to that more innovative model. At Hard Numbers. We don’t sell time, we sell results.

Andy West  40:30

I’ve got a I’ve got to jump in just quickly because I’m not talking about selling time externally. This is an internal resource management discussion. Let’s be really clear on that. Value pricing maximises AI efficiency. Right. Resource tracking proves it occurred. It’s internal. This is not about selling time. Let’s be really, really clear about that. This is about exactly what you say. It’s about selling outcomes and it’s about using AI intelligently. It’s about the balance between front row front work and grunt work. As you put it, the only way you can actually track whether you’re doing that, efficiently, whether you’re doing that profitably, is to actually track the time it takes to do that front work, and the time that AI is saving you to do that grunt work.

Darryl Sparey  41:23

Tony, I think you have had philosophy, you’ve had poetry, you’ve had management consulting. I mean, the all the gamut of human activity and endeavor. Right? I think you should run a poll after this. Have we contributed to or subtracted from the sum of human knowledge?

Tony Garner  41:44

Well, guys. Yeah, I totally agree. I just want to thank you both. I think I have to declare a winner. And I think the winner here is, is anybody who’s tuned in and listened to watch. What’s this? Because it’s been it’s been really thought provoking, really valuable, really interesting. And I think like you said, you, you agree on, on, on so much, I think it’d be really interesting. And I’m sure, Darryl, you’ll have agency bosses wanting to pick your brain about how you’re doing it and and their light ways on picking your brain on what they should be doing. So thank you guys for valuable time and a really interesting conversation.

Andy West  42:25

Brilliant. Thank you for having us on. Needs appreciated. And Darryl, I’ll see you soon.

Darryl Sparey  42:30

All the very best, my friend.

Andy West  42:31

Cheers, guys.

Speaker unclear  42:32

Cheers.

Tony Garner  42:35

Thanks for listening to PR in the Real World with me, Tony Garner. If you like what you’ve heard, it’d be great if you could subscribe and like and share. Spread the word. Basically help others find this great content. Thanks again for listening. Tune in next time.