Truus achieves 20% more efficiency while maintaining a 90% delivery rate with Float

Truus prides itself on making advertising for real people. Located in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, the advertising agency has a team of 38 creatives who have worked with big brands like Netflix, KFC, and Philips on everything from short radio ads to grand social campaigns.

What’s their secret to running big projects with a small team? (Hint. It’s one word.)

Float 😉  

With the help of Float, Truus has been able to run 20% more efficiently than it would without a resource planning tool. They have also maintained an impressive on-time delivery rate of 90%.

Float’s intuitive interface and collaborative features made it an easy choice

When Truus started growing from a few creatives to a bigger team, its founder Japie Stoppelenburg knew he needed a resource management tool.

His first (and) only option was Float.  

Why? Japie’s story with Float stretches back as much as ten years, when the agency he worked at as a creative director started using Float's resource management tool.

Since then, Float has been by Japie’s side, being his tool of choice from his creative director role in 2014 to his executive creative director role at Dept to his current role as an agency founder.

When I started Truus, we did Float from the jump. We didn't do any planning when we were just a few freelancers. But then, when we started being like a real company that needed a planning tool, it was just Float. I went back to it because it was my favorite and we’ve been using it ever since.

Japie has stuck with Float for one reason—it's intuitive.

Unlike with other resource management tools, his team doesn’t need to “create a million labels” to plan resources and monitor project progress.

"There’s just a clean overview of all the people in a big list. And you just drag and drop their time into their schedule."

Every project manager who has been on the Truus team (that’s 30 since the start of the agency) has required little to no help getting started with Float.

"There have been about 30 project managers who have started and left in the four years that we’ve used Float. Nobody has ever had any issues understanding the software. Everyone just sort of plugs and plays. They understand what it is because it's just so intuitive. And I think that's very impressive but also very underrated."

And for a small team juggling so many projects for different clients, the color-coded schedule view in Float proves invaluable.  

With specific colors for individual clients, a project manager or a team member can easily tell at a glance what everyone is working on. And it also serves as a clear indicator of availability.  

Japie also found that Float’s features match his philosophy around agency work.

As a rule, time tracking is not practiced at Truus.

"I think it's common for most agencies to have employees track their time. I don't believe in that. I think it creates a wrong environment for creative agency. I don't want the creatives to worry about their hours or their time tracking. I just want them to deliver."

Instead, the Truus team blocks out time for tasks ahead of time in Float.

"We schedule high-level blocks of time based on estimates from our senior creatives and account managers for doing the work. Creatives try to follow the scheduled estimates as best they can. If they’re done earlier, they’ll let us know, and we might make some extra money in the process. If they take a little longer, our philosophy is that it will probably balance itself out with the times they were done earlier. If someone consistently needs more time than they've been allocated, we examine if our estimates are too low or if the person needs to find a way to speed up."

Another thing that Japie loves is that his team can create project plans together.

The ability to collaborate has made Float the centerpiece of their resource planning meetings, where project managers come together to allocate work, adjust plans, and resolve issues like double booking.

Once decisions are made, the schedule in Float is updated and serves as a guide for the team.

Float is always breathing, always living. It guides people on what to do next.

Truus consistently achieves a 90% on-time delivery rate with Float

A clear schedule acting as a single source of truth has worked wonders for the Truus’ team delivery rates. They can boast of delivery work on or before due dates 90% of the time.

"I think our delivery has definitely improved. Ninety percent of our work is delivered on time because people know when they're supposed to do it."

Collaborating on project plans and resolving issues like double booking and schedule conflicts means that the team can spend less time asking questions and more time getting the work done.

"I would say we are at least 20%-30% more efficient because people spend less time waiting around, not knowing what to do."

And the biggest, unquantifiable benefit is being able to do impressive work for so many clients with a small team.

There was no way for us to do this company with this amount of clients, with this amount of sort of big brands, and deliver all this work without the system. There are so many projects happening at the same time that for a small agency like us, there is no way to handle that amount of little projects without having a visual planning tool.