Daniel Todd is the founder of Proactive Code, which started around 5 years ago with a few clients which have grown from companies with a handful of employees to some that now have a headcount of more than 100…
His agency is growing fast and is taking a friendlier, more casual approach with clients that allows them to see projects through to completion in a much shorter time period – part of the reason they rely on Atarim.
How Did Daniel Approach Web Design Before Atarim?
Hundreds and hundreds of emails. Just too many to speak of.
Before Atarim, Daniel would usually start his day by going through emails. At first, when he was working with a very small client base, it took just half an hour to do so. Then it eventually got to the point where he’d still start his day by going through emails and would only finish at 10:30 PM at which point he’d already had more emails requiring his attention, so it was essentially an infinite process.
Although he did try to use a tagging system that would help us categorize which emails were in relation to which client and which website, it simply wasn’t a sustainable system that would grow with his agency…
How Has Atarim Changed Daniel’s Agency?
From Daniel’s point of view, there has been an overdependence on him in his agency which is very common among web design agency owners
Increasingly he felt that he was becoming a bottleneck.
And thanks to implementing Atarim, working to mitigate this and pull himself out of the day-to-day of the business is becoming a reality…
He can now get clients to submit their own tickets and have his team handle those on their own without him getting involved unless really necessary.
Why Did Daniel Decide To Use Atarim Over The Other Tools Out There?
Over time, Daniel eventually built out a spreadsheet solely for internal use where he would manually paste in tickets/emails so he could categorize them and decide in which order he would have to work through them.
Yet that also kept growing at an infinite rate and he was looking for a system that would allow him to formalize the process. Specifically, though he was looking for a system that would also automatically email a client to let them know when a ticket had been completed as this was something really unnecessary that just needed to be taken out of his plate.
When coming across Atarim, he was really impressed by the fact that this system would allow clients to actually create the tickets themselves so he wouldn’t need to do so anymore which on its own saves 1-2 hours of his time per day for just one client…
He tried to get his custom spreadsheets to work for a while but eventually realized that every time he would onboard a new team member, he’d also have to explain how his system works and trust that they’d do everything the same way he did. Originally, he came on board with this system for clients but quickly realized that in addition to that, the fact that Atarim made it easy for new team members to acclimate to working as a part of his agency’s team and required much less training was another huge benefit…
Would Daniel recommend that others use Atarim?
Atarim saves us at least £500 GBP per week only taking into consideration my time. Calculating the ROI beyond that isn’t even worth doing anymore, it’s so clear to see…
After spending ages trying to figure out the way other ticketing systems work, Daniel found that none of them come close to how easy & intuitive Atarim makes it for clients to create tickets and give feedback.
Daniels #1 advice for other web design agency owners out there is not to try to do what he did and use emails or spreadsheets to manage a growing number of clients and requests. While it might feel like it’s working initially, the moment you start growing you won’t be able to scale. He regrets not having Atarim in place sooner because not being prepared to scale actually costs his agency money and stress which nobody needs…
