With Teamleader Orbit, Level Level made its own numbers as accessible as the platforms it builds

Level Level, based in Rotterdam, has been building complex WordPress platforms for twenty years. Ten years ago, they added accessibility to their offering. In practice that means people with visual, hearing, motor or cognitive impairments can use Level Level's platforms without difficulty. At Level Level, that isn't an add-on service but a quality standard. Everything the agency delivers meets the WCAG guidelines (the international standards for digital accessibility). Whether the client asks for it or not.

That growing niche expertise started to get noticed. Large organisations with in-house design and development departments began asking whether Level Level could help them build the same guidelines into their own workflow. Today the agency rests on two pillars: Level Platforms and Level Accessibility.

Christien joined thirteen years ago as the sixth employee and the first project manager. She brought experience from other agencies with her, and plenty of curiosity. "I asked a lot of questions," Christien says with a grin. "Like: how do we actually know how much time we're putting into projects?" To answer that question, she took on the operational side alongside her own projects. And so she grew with the agency: from project manager to managing director and partner.

So how did Level Level's tooling grow over the years? “The classic story,” as Christien calls it herself. Harvest for time tracking. Forecast for planning. Zoho CRM for sales. Another standalone app for bookkeeping. Each tool was good at one clearly defined job. "But then I needed quite a few spreadsheets to tie it all together," Christien says.

Those spreadsheets started to feel like a constraint, in two ways. First, any data in Excel is by definition yesterday's data. "We were often looking backwards. And the more visibility we got, the more we wanted to look ahead." Second, an Excel file isn't easy to hand over. Christien wanted her team to have that visibility too.

So Level Level went looking for software that would bring every data source together. That search ended with Teamleader Orbit.

At Level Level everyone gets scheduled, so every specialist starts their day in Orbit. It tells them what they're working on and for which project, and it's where they log their hours.

Christien herself doesn’t work on projects. She looks at the financial side: revenue generated, and whether the month's forecast is going to land. On top of that she works in the CRM every day, with separate pipelines per product. How much revenue do we need to close this month to hit the budget? Very useful data during sales meetings.

Work that's been sold is invoiced in Orbit too, with a clear view of overdue payments. People who don’t work on projects use it as well. "Even our office manager works in Orbit," Christien explains. "She doesn't just help with checking hours and invoicing. When we run an event, she knows exactly who to invite, because every contact is properly tagged in Orbit."

Billability is a delicate subject in the agency world. The tighter things get, the harder agencies focus on it. Level Level, surprisingly, started doing it less.

Not because the number doesn't matter, but because as an individual metric it puts people under pressure. On large projects, a client shifting their schedule is enough to drag someone's billability down. "That’s negative pressure on that person, even though it's caused by external factors."

"I used to focus on it a lot, because it was one of the few hard metrics we had", Christien says. "Now we have so many more important metrics that we don't need to put that pressure on our people."

So which metrics does Christien use instead? Margin is the baseline, with a budget that looks forward: what can a month cost, what does a month need to bring in. Below that you have projects, where the effective hourly rate is the number that matters most.

"If you combine project margins with a solid forecast and a firm grip on your scheduling, you can let go of billability at the individual level a bit more," Christien adds.

As a recently appointed board member of Dutch Digital Agencies, the Dutch industry association for digital agencies, Christien gets the question every now and then: would Orbit be right for us? Her answer comes with a caveat. "You can't expect tooling to solve all your problems. You need to know what you want to know, and you need to be ready for it as an agency."

The mindset you bring to a migration like that is what makes the difference. "If you're going to do it half-heartedly, don't do it. You have to go all in, and with the whole team," Christien says. "And then get everything out of it. That's when it works really well."

And how does Christien see Level Level's future? “The mission stays the same: making the internet more accessible. But salaries need to be paid, and the economy is volatile,” she says. "That makes it more and more important for us to look ahead and get a grip on a future you can't really predict. So it's good that Orbit gives us that insight, and that we can make decisions based on the data we've collected."