From 15 people per leader to as many as 90.

SoCheers wanted its team leaders to run bigger teams without losing money doing it. The obstacle was that nobody could tell what a team was worth. Profitability was understood at company level and nowhere below it, and team leaders had no idea what they contributed to billing — partly because in a creative agency there is no obvious way to compare the output of two people doing different kinds of work. We built the common unit, priced it, automated the collection, and pushed profitability down to team, cluster and client level. Team sizes went from an average of around15to as many as90.

Talking to the team leaders produced a consistent answer, and it was not defensiveness. They genuinely did not know what their team contributed to billing. Services were sold bundled, so there was no way to attribute revenue back to the people who did the work. Management looked at profitability at company level because that was the only level at which it existed.

Which meant a team leader was being asked to run a team efficiently while being denied any information about whether they were. Every judgement about capacity, hiring, workload and who was carrying whom was being made on impression.

This is the question that makes creative businesses hard to measure, and most agencies answer it by not trying.

Two designers sit at the same level on the same team. One works on statics and print. The other works on video. Their outputs take different amounts of time, require different skills and are worth different amounts to a client. Count deliverables and the print designer looks like a hero. Count hours and neither of them is comparable to anybody. Count nothing and you are back to impression.

So we built parity at skill level — mapping the outcomes of the various skills a service requires, so that different kinds of work at the same level could be placed on one scale. Then we set internal billing rates for each service based on the value of that service, standardised across clients and teams.

That second step is what turns a measurement into economics. A common unit tells you who produced more. A common unit with a price tells you what a team is worth, what a client is worth, and whether a new joiner has started paying for themselves.

Each step here only works because the one before it exists. It is worth reading in order.

Step six is where an agency usually finds money it did not know it was losing. Comparing the scope of work planned against what was actually delivered exposes the extra rounds, the additional assets and the small favours that never made it onto an invoice. Most agencies suspect this is happening. Very few can put a number on it per client.

Putting a number on creative output is contentious and it should be. Any parity system compresses judgement into a scale, and a scale can be gamed, resented or quietly ignored — particularly by good people who feel their work does not reduce to a unit. We built this at skill level rather than individual level and standardised rates by service value rather than by effort, both of which reduce the problem. Neither eliminates it, and a system like this needs an owner who will keep revisiting the scale as the work changes.

We also did not measure the thing the client cared most about at the start. The brief was scaling profitably, and the evidence we can show is span of control and visibility. Gross margin by team over time, or revenue per head against the pre-engagement baseline, would have said it properly. Both were computable from the system we built and neither was baselined before we started.