Straight talk on workflow, effort, pricing, and delivery for creative and technical services firms.
July 24, 2026
The real agency industry is not the holding companies in the headlines. It is tens of thousands of small, independent shops, and there are more of them every…
July 23, 2026
Last night we were at the inaugural Carolina Tech Founders event, and it was exactly the kind of evening that makes you glad you build where you build.…
July 15, 2026
Video studios keep timelines from slipping by mapping pre-production, shoot, and post as separate deliverables with honest effort on each, so a delay in one stage is visible…
July 8, 2026
AI saves the most time on the low-stakes, high-volume work that surrounds delivery: first drafts, summarizing long threads and calls, reformatting, and early research you will verify anyway.…
July 1, 2026
Net Net today announced the launch of Net Net V2, a completely rebuilt platform for creative and technical services firms. After two years of listening closely to the owners who run these businesses, Net…
June 24, 2026
Document processes as lightweight checklists that live inside the work itself, not as long documents in a folder nobody opens. Capture the handful of steps that actually matter…
June 17, 2026
Use your completed jobs as the starting point for every new estimate: pull the actual effort similar work took, and build the new number from what really happened…
June 10, 2026
Onboard new clients from a repeatable checklist so kickoff, access, and setup run as tracked tasks instead of eating into your delivery hours ad hoc. Build the onboarding…
June 3, 2026
Quote a retainer as a defined block of monthly effort, not a vague promise to be available, so both sides know how many hours the retainer covers and…
May 27, 2026
PR firms plan for unpredictable work by reserving capacity for it on purpose, instead of assuming a quiet week and scrambling when news breaks. Hold back a slice…
May 20, 2026
Keep quality control by treating AI-assisted work exactly like a junior draft: useful to start from, never shipped without review. Set a clear standard for what a human…
May 13, 2026
Your team can run as many projects at once as their available hours can cover, which is almost always fewer than the calendar suggests. Add up the real…
May 6, 2026
Estimate unfamiliar work by comparing it to the closest thing you have actually done, then widening the number into a range that reflects how little you know. Break…
April 30, 2026
We were down in Miami for the B2B Marketing Expo, and it was a good reminder of how much energy there is right now in the world of…
April 21, 2026
It should make the work visible sooner and take the retyping off your hands, and that is close to the whole list. Useful workflow AI surfaces where a…
April 15, 2026
Treat every client approval as a blocking deliverable with an owner and a due date, so a job that is waiting on sign-off looks different from a job…
April 8, 2026
Build your rate card from the effort each role actually spends, not from a round number that sounds fair. Set a rate per role based on the hours…
April 1, 2026
Full-service agencies keep many jobs on track by managing capacity across all of them at once, not job by job. With dozens of deliverables moving through the same…
March 25, 2026
Yes, be transparent about how you work, but lead with outcomes and judgment rather than the tools. Clients are not paying for the tools you use; they are…
March 18, 2026
Handoffs break down when ownership goes fuzzy: the work sits in a gap where the last person thinks they are done and the next person doesn't know it…
March 11, 2026
Your estimates come in low because they price the obvious creative work and quietly skip everything around it: the revision rounds, the client coordination, the admin, the meetings,…
March 4, 2026
Set timeline expectations by quoting delivery dates built from your team's real capacity, not from the client's hopes or your best-case day. Look at what your team already…
February 25, 2026
The choice comes down to who carries the effort risk. Fixed fee puts the risk on you: if the work runs long, you absorb the extra hours, so…
February 18, 2026
Dev shops handle shifting scope by estimating each sprint from a fixed team capacity, not a fixed feature list, and tracking estimated against actual hours as the work…
February 11, 2026
An AI use policy for your agency needs to answer three questions in plain language: which tools your team may use, what client information is allowed to go…
February 4, 2026
Standardize your workflows by turning each repeatable project type into a reusable template: the same deliverables, tasks, and effort estimates every time, so delivery does not depend on…
January 28, 2026
Break a big project down until each piece is small enough that you can estimate it from experience instead of guessing. Start with the deliverables the client actually…
January 20, 2026
If your firm does not have an AI policy, you have one anyway; it is just unwritten and inconsistent. By 2026 everyone on your team uses AI in…
January 14, 2026
A brief prevents scope creep when it names the exact deliverables, states the effort assumptions behind them, and defines what happens when something changes. Scope creep grows in…
January 7, 2026
When you can't predict the effort, don't price the whole project as a single fixed number. Price it as a range built from the effort each phase is…
December 31, 2025
Branding studios keep revision rounds from eating the timeline by treating each round as a defined deliverable with a set scope and a planned effort budget, not an…
November 12, 2025
The first impression is moving from a list of links to a single answer, and your firm is either inside that answer or invisible. Prospects are starting to…
October 14, 2025
AI video crossed the line from novelty to tool this year, and it changes what a small studio can credibly scope. Google's Veo 3 brought synchronized sound and…
September 9, 2025
Less than the launch promised and more than the cynics said. A month after GPT-5's August arrival, the honest read for a small firm is that the everyday…
August 1, 2025
Effective effort tracking is consistent, low-friction, and tied to real work, not a surveillance tool. Make logging take seconds, tie every entry to a Job and Task, and use the data to…
June 24, 2025
An MCP is a standard way to let an AI assistant safely use your tools, and here is the part that surprises people: it runs on the same…
April 24, 2025
Both, and which one you get depends entirely on scope. Vibe coding, the new habit of building software by describing it to a model until it works, can…
March 28, 2025
The line is other people's style, and it moved from theoretical to urgent this week. ChatGPT's new native image generation is good enough that the whole internet spent…
February 7, 2025
Agencies lose time to tool switching because every app holds one slice of a Job, and the connections live in people's heads. Each jump between CRM, tracker, spreadsheet, and chat costs context…
January 29, 2025
What changed this week is the price of the frontier, not your Monday. DeepSeek's R1 reached the top of the App Store and gave the market a genuine…
December 31, 2024
It's time when the tracker tells you what everyone already knows and misses what nobody does: tasks are done but the Job is late, effort is invisible, contractors live outside the system…
November 22, 2024
It depends on your real bottleneck. Asana, Trello, ClickUp, and Monday all manage tasks well, and all charge per seat, which punishes contractor-heavy shops. If your pain is organizing tasks, any of…
November 13, 2024
Yes. Value pricing changes what you charge, not what the work costs you in effort. Tracking effort against every deliverable is how you know whether the price was right, which Jobs drift…
October 30, 2024
Most owners shopping for project profitability software are really missing two numbers that come before profit: what each deliverable was planned to take, and what it actually took. Profit math is easy…
October 22, 2024
Agency chat turns to chaos because decisions get buried in channels that have nothing to do with the work. The fix is chat attached to the Job, Deliverable, or Task it concerns…
October 2, 2024
Most small agencies do not need a full CRM. They need to stop dropping opportunities and losing context between selling and delivering. A lightweight way to track companies, people, and opportunities, connected…
September 16, 2024
Slop is what AI produces when nobody with taste is steering, and your job is to make sure that person is always steering. The web is filling up…
August 1, 2024
Net Net, a new workflow and project management platform built specifically for creative and technical services firms, today announced its general availability. Born inside a working agency, Net Net helps owners answer a deceptively…
July 15, 2024
Perplexity earns a place in the research phase because it answers with its sources showing, which is exactly what you need when the output will inform a client…
May 20, 2024
The speed and the price are usable today; the sci-fi voice demo is mostly a preview. GPT-4o, released this month, makes everyday agency tasks quicker and cheaper to…
March 12, 2024
For client-facing writing, yes, it is worth a serious trial. Anthropic's Claude 3, released this month in three sizes, is the first model many writers say does not…
January 18, 2024
One default, and a good reason before you add a second. As of early 2024 you have ChatGPT, Claude, Bard, Grok, and Copilot all asking for a spot…
December 5, 2023
Quick Tasks are for real work that does not deserve a full Job: a one-off request, an internal to-do, a small fix. They still carry an owner, a Service Type, and effort…
November 16, 2023
Build one only if you already have a repetitive writing or answering task you can describe in a paragraph. OpenAI's new custom GPTs let you wrap ChatGPT around…
October 16, 2023
We are heading to the Startup Mountain Summit in Johnson City, Tennessee, and if you are going to be there, we would love to say hello. We are…
October 12, 2023
This was the year AI image generation went from a curiosity to something you have to have an opinion about. DALL-E 3 now sits inside ChatGPT and follows…
September 6, 2023
There is no single healthy number: it depends on how much selling, managing, and learning your team carries beside client work. What matters is that utilization is defined consistently, visible weekly, and…
August 25, 2023
Accurate estimates come from evidence, not gut feel: break the work into deliverables, plan effort for each by the type of work involved, and compare what you planned against what past projects…
August 17, 2023
Value pricing fits work whose outcome is worth far more than the effort it takes, sold by firms that can scope it confidently. It rewards firms that know what their work actually…
August 12, 2023
Net Net captures effort two ways: a live timer you start on a Task, or manual entry when you forget or work offline. Every entry ties to the Job, Deliverable, and Task…
July 12, 2023
Consultants sell expertise, not hours, but they still need to know what delivery costs them in effort. Track effort by engagement and deliverable, lightly, so you can see which clients are worth…
July 7, 2023
Retainers expand quietly because small asks never hit a decision point. The fix is a visible baseline: agree what the retainer covers in effort, log every request against it, and when the…
June 29, 2023
IT firms live with two clocks: planned project work and unplanned support that interrupts it. The fix is one system holding both, with effort tracked across each, so support load is visible…
June 21, 2023
Ad work runs on overlapping deadlines and recurring retainers, so drift hides in the churn. Keep every campaign and retainer as a Job with planned effort, and review effort against the plan…
May 31, 2023
Raise rates on evidence and timing, not apology: know what the work actually takes, give clients a full cycle of notice, anchor the increase to scope clarity rather than your costs, and…
May 17, 2023
Web projects overrun because revisions, scope changes, and content delays hide until the end. The fix is a plan broken into deliverables with effort set by type of work, then watching actual…
May 1, 2023
Most small firms do not run pure agile or pure waterfall, they run a practical hybrid. Fixed-scope client work needs waterfall's clear plan and deliverables, while discovery and iterative work borrow agile's…
April 25, 2023
When the people on the client side disagree with each other, the work stalls in the gap. The fix is to surface the conflict early, get one decision-maker named, and put decisions…
April 19, 2023
Progress billing invoices a project in stages tied to milestones instead of one lump at the end, which steadies cash flow and lowers the risk of a big unpaid balance. It works…
April 3, 2023
A useful debrief compares what you planned against what happened: estimated versus actual effort by deliverable, where the timeline slipped, and which scope changes were captured. Skip the vague what-went-well and look…
February 21, 2023
Underselling starts when you quote before you understand the work. Scope in deliverables first, price from what similar work actually took, present the number with its assumptions attached, and treat pushback as…
February 16, 2023
Compare at the deliverable level, not the project total. Record planned effort for each deliverable by type of work, log actual effort as the work happens, and review the gap while the…
January 23, 2023
In January 2023 we published ChatGPT's own unedited plan for automating agency workflow. Three years later, about half of it happened, none of it the way it predicted, and the biggest change…
January 1, 2023
Net Net is workflow management software for creative and technical services firms: one place to sell, plan, deliver, and track every Job, so you can see how your work actually flows…
December 18, 2022
Client delays are the most common cause of blown timelines, and the fix is structural, not confrontational. Track when work is waiting on the client, make that wait visible, and agree upfront…
November 22, 2022
Cost variance is effort: you planned a deliverable at one level of effort and it took more. Schedule variance is time: it took longer on the calendar than planned. A Job can…
November 2, 2022
The 25-15 method is a simple capacity rule for small teams: plan people to a realistic ceiling of billable effort, not their full week, so meetings, admin, and the unexpected have somewhere…
October 13, 2022
Contractors work best when they are inside your system, not emailed around it. Give them access to the Jobs and Tasks they own, let them log effort where the work happens, and…
September 25, 2022
Agency cash flow swings because delivery drifts and payments lag, and the two compound. Work you sold at one level of effort quietly takes more, while invoices land late. You cannot fix…
July 4, 2022
Internal projects slip because nobody treats them like real Jobs. Your website, your rebrand, your new service line get squeezed whenever client work heats up. Giving internal work the same plan, effort…
June 15, 2022
A traffic manager keeps work moving between people so nothing stalls or collides. Most small firms do not need a full-time one, they need the visibility a traffic manager provides. If you…
May 9, 2022
Care, but do not reorganize the studio around it. DALL-E 2 can turn a sentence into an image, which is genuinely new, but in the spring of 2022…
January 28, 2022
Workflow management software connects the stages of client work (selling it, planning it, delivering it, tracking the effort it takes) in one place, so the owner can see how work actually…
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