How FRANZ//ROSA balances structure and creativity while running three agencies with Teamleader Orbit

As the name suggests, FRANZ//ROSA has a built-in duality. FRANZ is the sober half: planning, numbers, performance. ROSA is the other side: ideas, images, feeling. The two slashes are the bridge between them.

The agency started in 2018 with social media and kept widening its scope, because great social work pointing at a bad website still leads to bad results. Today it runs as a 360-degree digital agency with three entities, each specialising in a different market.

The tooling grew the way agency tooling usually does. A tool for time tracking. A tool for projects. A spreadsheet for whatever was left. "The whole agency system was working. We also had structure," Jonathan says. "But it was not easy to handle."

Islands of tools turn into islands of data. Each tool held a piece of the truth, none talked to the others, and everyone worked from their own view of the numbers.

Three things made that challenging. First, the management of FRANZ//ROSA does client work too, so every hour spent on operations is an hour taken away from billable work.

Second, the future stayed vague. Planning inside a project was solid, planning beyond projects was not. "It always took hours to bring everything together and have a good overview,” Jonathan explains. 

And third, the fact that FRANZ//ROSA is actually three entities (so visible, so loud, so attractive), with employees movinghovering in between the different sub-agencies.

The island setup had takengot the agency pretty far. The next step was making it easy to handle: one place where everyone looks at the same picture.

FRANZ//ROSA quickly landed on Teamleader Orbit when looking for a tool to give them an overview and make planning ahead easier. But that was not what settled the choice. “The main point for us was to have the monthly retainer models integrated,” Jonathan adds.

The retainer integration offers insight into hiring too. In one big retainer, the creative work kept running over, so the next hire was a creative one. “We’ve grown the right way,” Jonathan says.

Retainers run for months, so they are easy to see coming. Projects, however, are harder: who is free, what is already running in parallel, is there room at all? And the market is moving that way, with more clients starting withon a project instead of a retainer. Luckily for FRANZ//ROSA, that’s also something Orbit nailed.

The financial overview counted just as much. Their old setup could send an invoice but said nothing about next month, so the forecast lived in a spreadsheet. Now the forecast, incoming work and invoices sit together, and an analysis that used to cost an evening takes seconds.

German bookkeeping has its own vocabulary, and one label in the software was not the one their external bookkeeper knew. He had never come across the term, so nobody was quite sure which number it corresponded to. One question to the onboarding team sorted it. They pulled the accountant into the conversation, translated between the two, and worked from examples at other agencies.

The onboarding team also helped out with customisation. FRANZ//ROSA wanted the option to keep logging hours on a client once the agreed budget was used up, without those hours reaching the invoice. The fix: give every project a separate line for extra work, non-billable, that anyone can still track time against. “That was the perfect impulse for us to reconsider how we set up projects,” Jonathan says. “It’s nice to know that everything’s possible.”

FRANZ//ROSA’s client portfolio is moving towards bigger brands and more services per project, so the work keeps getting more comprehensive. Which is exactly the complexity the FRANZ half of the name exists for, and Jonathan is confident his agency can handle it.

“Teamleader will definitely help us there, because we get the comprehensive view and it takes a lot of searching work away from us,” he says. “If everything that’s mainly controlling is set up, we can really focus on what we love the most and do the best.”