For Invanity, a UK-based digital marketing agency founded in 2019, helping clients grow their revenue through performance-led digital marketing isn’t just about vanity metrics. With a growing team offering services like SEO, paid media, ABM, and web development, running surface-level marketing campaigns isn’t going to cut it.
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Challenge: Outgrowing a legacy system
For Luke Powell, Head of Operations at Invanity, the urgency of finding a better alternative was all too clear. As the person responsible for improving processes at the agency, Luke set out to lead the charge to modernize how Invanity managed its projects and resources.
“As someone on the operations side, having a tool like Teamwork.com is critical,” he said. “We need to make sure that everyone's workloads are set up to get insight into where time is spent, how it's spent, whether it's billable or non-billable, how we can become more efficient, and if we’re delivering work profitably.”
Before Teamwork.com, Invanity relied on a legacy project management tool that had been inherited from a previous agency experience. But as the agency matured, so did the complexity of its client work… and the cracks began to show. “Tasks that should have taken minutes felt unnecessarily clunky. The UI was poor, and the team dreaded using it.”
As the agency scaled, it became clear that their existing project management tool couldn’t keep up. Scheduling tasks was time-consuming and unintuitive, the UI user interface was clunky, and managing workloads was inefficient and unreliable. On top of that, visibility into project performance and financials was limited at best.
Luke recognized the need for a platform that went beyond basic project management and could act as a central nervous system for a growing agency.
Solution: Finding the right features for the right jobs
Luke conducted a rigorous discovery process, identifying potential solutions based on his prior experience, industry research, and online reviews. His shortlist included Asana, Monday.com, Synergist, and Productive.io. But it was Teamwork.com that stood out for several reasons:
An agency-specific focus on delivery client work, with features that highlighted profitability, utilization, and delivery
A lean, user-friendly UI that encouraged team-wide onboarding adoption
A slew of in-depth features for both project and financial management—all that could be backed up with by comprehensive reports
Strong support and responsiveness from the sales team
“We didn’t just want a project management tool. We needed an agency operations platform. Teamwork.com was the only one that ticked all the right boxes.”
Luke trialed Teamwork.com, built a feature-based evaluation framework, and onboarded the entire agency incrementally. “From the initial evaluation through to the free trial and then discussions with the account manager, it was clear that Teamwork.com was going to alleviate the pains we were experiencing and significantly improve areas of the agency such as project management and delivery, as well as the financial management of projects and having insight into our service levels for our clients,” he said.
From there, training was delivered in stages to avoid overwhelming the team, and the transition was helped by Teamwork.com’s intuitive interface and the team’s readiness to move on from the previous tool.
Among the key features Luke and his team regularly rely on, a few stand out in particular:
Workload Planner to manage capacity, assign tasks, and prevent burnout
“We’ve set daily targets for people’s capacity so we can quickly identify where they are overcommitted and make adjustments. We can also see into the upcoming weeks to plan for incoming work.
Time tracking and timesheets for daily logging across billable and non-billable work
“Timesheets have always been something people have a grudge against doing. So making sure that it's as simple for people to do every day is great for us.”
Budgets and cost rates to monitor financial performance on a per-client and per-project basis.
“I also want to look at it from a billable rate perspective as well, because I like to reconcile projects based on the billable rate±mostly so that we make sure the service we're delivering aligns with the value we promise our clients."
Profitability and Utilization Reports to evaluate efficiency, identify over-servicing, and reconcile client value against service delivery
“We always want to make sure that we're using our resources as effectively and efficiently as possible, ensuring each client receives the service level required."
Centralized task communication to streamline feedback, reviews, and handoffs
Recurring budgets and templates to manage retainers and eliminate repetitive setup
Results: Better performance, deeper insights, smarter delivery
Since adopting Teamwork.com, Invanity has seen measurable improvements across their day-to-day operations and broader business performance:
50% reduction in time spent building project plans
80% decrease in time spent on weekly workload management
20% increase in on-time delivery of projects
Thanks to Teamwork.com, Invanity is now able to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time delivering value to clients. “The time it takes us to schedule tasks/projects and manage them throughout a project/retainer lifecycle is at least half than what it was before,” Luke said. “This allows us to spend far less time on administrative tasks and instead reallocate that time to work that contributes to more valuable outcomes.”
Budgeting, client reconciliation, and project profitability are no longer a black box. And ultimately, these insights inform weekly agency performance reports that help the leadership team make smarter decisions.
“There’s no perfect software. But Teamwork.com gives us exactly what we need to operate efficiently, deliver on time, and grow profitably.”