How can agencies be made profitable and organized?

After founding and running the Disko agency for almost 10 years, Davy Tessier and Mickael Lellouche now head up Furious, an online management tool that offers agencies, startups and consultancies a complete solution for controlling their operations and optimizing their profitability.

So, for this Entrepreneur Talk, we gave the floor to Davy Tessier, co-founder of Furious. He tells us what goes on behind the scenes of his 100% remote company, and how this “control tower” can make your agency’s – and your own – life easier.

What is Furious in a few sentences?

Davy Tessier: It’s an online agency management tool. Furious manages all workflows and everything to do with managing an agency – from prospecting to quotations, including sales closing, pre-sales organization, project management, Gantt charts, ticket management tools, planning, invoices, purchases, accounting closings, human resources, interviews, etc. It’s an extremely comprehensive tool with a good number of functionalities. It’s an extremely comprehensive tool, with a wide range of functionalities. The advantage of having all this in one place is that we gain intelligence from all this data. This enables us to be predictive and save time.

The downside for us is that every one of these features has to be at market level, or better. Our challenge over the last few years has been not just to create something that saves time, but something that saves time when compared to the market standards – such as Pipedrive and Hubspot. Except that these are tools that only present one end of the business. For example, Pipedrive is great for managing pre-sales. But managing and knowing the time spent on all the customer’s pre-sales, as well as the time spent on project wins with the customer in relation to overall profitability, is impossible to calculate with single-feature tools.

Is Furious unique in the marketplace?

D.T.: As Furious is a general-purpose tool in a niche sector, it allows us to think in a way that’s highly adapted to this market. There are ERPs that specialize in all kinds of sectors (e.g. Septeo for the legal professions), but we specialize in ” man-time ” sales, time for money, and package sales.

All this is something we had developed in our former life at Disko. We had 10 years of very strong growth (+40% per year), we had offices all over the place and we were always profitable. Why? Because we had mastered our workflows and managed with something other than theaccountant ‘s reporting, which always comes after the war. When you have 20 or even 30% turnover compared with 40% growth, that means you’ve renewed more than half your business in one year. And what’s more, if you renew some of your customers and acquire new ones, it’s very hard to model in your head if you’re not predictive. You need to have something that’s highly adapted to your stock of talent, in relation to the stock of projects in progress, but also in relation to the pre-sales you’re applying for, with win probability rates, and so on.

When you put all these parameters into the equation, you end up with something that’s very difficult to do, let alone recalculate every month – hence why we developed this flow management approach, which was the philosophical embryo of Furious.

What led you to create Furious?

D.T.: When we sold Disko, I started doing other things: real estate, lots of projects, and I even launched a boat alarm start-up! Then one day, some ex-brothers came to me and said ” you’ve developed something nice with Disko, now that we’re no longer competitors, could you help us out with some in-house tools too?”. And with an interesting objective, since this was before Covid. In this case, the bosses were saying, for example, ” Okay, I’m a big agency based in Lyon, and I’d like to go and spend 2 days a week in the mountains, but how can I manage my teams without being with them on a daily basis? When you have several agencies in several countries, you can’t be everywhere. That’s how we came up with our first prototype. When I presented it to this colleague, he came along with two or three other agency heads, and it was launched. Soon, others joined us – as it’s a small business and everyone knows each other – and customers came to us spontaneously.

Why the name Furious?

D.T.: I also created Furious, because I realized that in a lot of the other sectors I’d been involved in, everything was very slow – real estate and startups, for example. Quickly, we had to get back to something with more at stake, which is why we called it Furious. At the outset, this tool was primarily designed to help entrepreneurs, to explain things methodologically. Over the last 2-3 years, the tools have been enriched with artificial intelligence.

Furious stands for velocity. We’re betting on our ability to accompany our customers in their ” furious growth “.

Are agencies already equipped with this type of solution?

D.T. : We have two main types of agency profile: firstly, small agencies with fewer than 15 employees. In general, they have a lot of different tools, but don’t perceive the flows between them – and they often manage with the boss (who sees everything and does everything) at the center of gravity.

When an agency exceeds 50-70 people, not one of them has plenty of tools. They’ll have tools, but they’re usually 20 years old – and very finance-oriented.

That’s the big difference with Furious: we come from operations. The tools were designed first and foremost to improve the day-to-day lives of people, project managers and customer managers, and then to provide financial reporting.

There’s a final category: agencies that have nothing, and delegate everything to their accounting firm. They expect someone who doesn’t know the business to be able to make recommendations…

What part does support play in your offer, beyond the tool itself?

D.T.: Support is systematically included. In fact, it’s quite short, given that customers can get to grips with the tool very quickly. But it’s also included because the tool is so vast and modular. We offer assistance on training-related subjects, with a best practices presentation – in which Furious will present elements and deploy methodological training. The aim is to make customers aware of certain elements so that they can implement their own modifications. After that, all these suggestions will depend on the nature and size of the company and who we’re dealing with.

What kind of teams do you have?

D.T.: We have three main divisions:

1- Discover is the upstream department that checks that what we have, the market, matches what we hear. We discover our customers’ problems, and they discover the tool. This is our marketing/communication department.

2- Success, whose job is to guarantee the success of the migration.

3- Product, which deals with the product and its improvements.

Our average age is around 38, with senior staff having spent at least 10 years in the agency.

Isn’t it every digital agency manager’s dream to switch to SaaS (Software as a Service)?

D.T.: It’s quite a dream! It’s all the more of a dream because, at the beginning of the month, we know how much sales we’re going to make. The slightest extra effort creates new customers. It’s much more reassuring – I spent 15 years securing end-of-month cut-offs, praying that they would go through.

Secondly, we have put a lot of our people into project mode – 50% of the product team works on customer feedback. When a customer tells us something during the day, the improvement can be made for them the very next day. This is a real gap compared to the software world.

50% of the staff is focused on short reaction times, the other 50% on “long” reactions – i.e. doing things we haven’t been asked to do, to help the customer.

Are you fully remote, or do you still have premises?

D.T.: We have two offices, one in Montpellier and one in Paris. But the company is designed for 100% remote working – all meetings are held online, for example. We also all use Furious.

How do you see the agency market today? And in 3 years’ time?

D.T.: Last year, we saw strong growth among our customers – not necessarily digital agencies, by the way. We also saw an increase in profitability. 2021 and 2022 were excellent years in terms of cash and acquisitions. They have been more difficult from an HR point of view, and are starting to tighten up from a commercial point of view.

There was a crisis (Covid) that the agencies took in their stride, and they found it hard to manage the HR side of things – not everyone was ready to go back to work at full speed. Recruiting became complicated. That’s what we’ve noticed over the last few months: the issues around sales management, production and human resources.

What we’re starting to see abroad are concerns about the tight management of costs and payroll in relation to earnings. This is particularly the case if some customers cut their budgets. From a commercial point of view, we’re sensing a tightening up at the end of the year, even if it’s still too early to say.

From a short-term point of view, we think there will be some adjustment effects, particularly if there are still macroeconomic issues. A year ago, it was unthinkable to imagine Ukraine and the energy crisis linked to gas and oil. We were talking about Covid, and it was already huge!

We don’t know what will happen in the next few months, but given the tension at sales level, marketing departments may be impacted. Even so, we’re on a fast-growing trend, because the demand for intelligence is constantly increasing in all markets. We believe that the intellectual services market has a bright future ahead of it. We’re also aware of the underlying trends: agency management methods will migrate, and Furious tools will go with them. There will be more independent contracts, fewer permanent contracts, more freelancers, and more interaction between them and the rest of the payroll.

Hybrid working is something I’ve seen a lot of in tech startups, and we’re seeing it arrive and spread to the rest of the world. We see a gradual migration towards hybrid teams. Both in the nature of the contract and in its duration.

We want to be a European alternative to Anglo-Saxon tools, because there are some great ways of looking at organization in Europe. That’s what we’re trying to be, on our modest scale – hoping that our scale will only grow.