Flight Story is 50% more efficient and saves 2 hours every day with Float

Flight Story is a global marketing and communications company that uses creativity, data, and technology to help brands reach their audience.

With a team of 120 people across Europe, America, Africa, and Asia, they have worked with big names like Amazon and Apple and have helped build the foundation for smaller, upcoming brands.

In Flight Story’s Manchester studio, Float saves the team up to two hours daily and boosts efficiency by 50%. The experience has been so successful that they plan to roll out Float to the rest of their global team.

It was hard to get project timing right

Like most business owners, Flight Story's Co-founder and Global Studio Director, Jason Fisher, finds timing a big challenge. Figuring out when projects will be delivered and ensuring not to under or over-promise, all while getting things done on time, is not easy.

"I think the greatest challenge has always been timing, so I've always gravitated towards Float," says Jason.

Flight Story launched Float from day 1

Having previously worked at a large creative agency (another customer of Float; you can read their case study here), Jason understood the importance of starting out on the right foot.

Instead of waiting till his team grew to start using resource management software, Jason launched Float from day one. His experience of scaling quickly in the past had taught him the importance of getting the foundation right from the start.

From day one, it's the first thing I signed up to. And even though there were just two of us, there's no question that you've got to set up the systems early and get off on the right foot. Otherwise, planning and organization become your Achilles heel down the line because you've not got the foundation there. When you suddenly get busy and win that big job you've been hoping for, you need the tool in place. And doing all of that at the same time as being right in the thick of client delivery is never fun.

Float was also Jason’s tool of choice because he had been using it for five years prior to starting Flight Story. He stuck with it because he understood how scalable it is.  

"The reason it's stayed with us is that I know from experience that it worked for us to manage our time as a team of two. It now helps us manage our time as a team of 10. And previously, it helped me manage a team of 40-50."  

But there was more than just scalability—Float made life easier and more efficient for the whole team.

"It's got a bit of a calming effect because if anyone checks their calendar on a day-to-day basis, they know what they've got coming up and what time they've got to work with. It helps counteract the Sunday scaries because there are guardrails in there to help people know what's coming in their week, on any given day."

Flight Story is 50% more efficient and saves two hours daily

By using Float to create project cost estimates and track budgets, the Flight Story team is now 50% more efficient than they would have been without a resource management tool.

Float has made us 50% more efficient in terms of how we're budget tracking and streamlining our workflow. We took on a project at the start of this year, and it was the first time we’d done a project like that. We used the reports from that project to baseline future ones. We've done five more of those projects this year, and every single one came in right on budget exactly where we planned it.

The Flight Story team also saves up to two hours daily: instead of spending time in meetings to get status updates, Jason can look into Float to get an idea of what the team is doing. Team members get all the details about their work in a brief linked in Float, so they don't need to spend time discussing specifics. They can see the job details they need and plan ahead.

"That alone also saves loads of conversations. These are granular time savers over the course of a week, and when you look at it as a whole across a big team, it saves a huge amount of time across the board and for me as an individual. It's like two hours a day per person because you're cutting out that morning brief session for me as a manager and the day-to-day standups I used to have."

And there are some unexpected and unquantifiable benefits as well.

Implementing Float from day one made it easy to do accounting for the business. This was important at the pivotal point where all business units had to share detailed utilization reports with investors: Flight Story could do that in just a few clicks, whereas other teams outside of the Manchester studio had to catch up and track the numbers manually.

There has also been improved collaboration in the team. People can see everyone’s availability and skills, and they can understand who’s available to help and reach out to them. Team members also volunteer to help on projects that pique their interest when they have nothing firmly booked.

The improved collaboration isn’t something you would usually expect from a planning tool.