Marcel Petitpas, Co-founder and CEO at Parakeeto, is specialized in helping agencies to get a handle on their gains along with being a respected keynote/virtual speaker and podcaster. You can expect to see more from him over the coming weeks, as he shares important insights for agency owners who want to earn more while working less.
Our marketing should add more value to the world than our product ever does. Our focus is on being genuinely helpful with the content we create and being specific about the problems we can help them solve.
MEDIA 7: Could you please take us through your professional journey?
MARCEL PETITPAS: I started my “real” career working for Apple as an Account Manager. From there, I went on to attempt to start several businesses and like most entrepreneurs had mixed results and mostly a lot of failures. I started an agency doing virtual reality services for real estate agents, experimented with several SaaS ideas, spent a year of my life as a professional speaker traveling around North America delivering keynotes, and eventually co-founded Parakeeto with the help of a few investors including Dan Martell and Jarod Ferguson.
M7: How does Parakeeto help digital and creative agencies to accurately scope projects quickly?
MP: As a product, Parakeeto helps agencies use real data about past projects to create more realistic estimates for future projects. It also helps them easily model financials on top of those estimates to ensure they are setting themselves up for profitability. As a consultancy, we also help agencies with many of the challenges they face around their operations and data. From designing the right dashboards and metrics, complete with tailor-made benchmarks and targets for their agency to evaluating the data schemas and tooling that makes the business run and generates insight. We also educate and advise agencies on how to measure, interpret and act on the feedback they get from their data and reporting, in order to build a more scalable and profitable business. At the core of everything is our Agency Profitability Flywheel framework. It is our thesis on how to build profitable and scalable operations into the DNA of any professional services business.
One of the biggest challenges for any professional services business is being able to have forward-visibility and getting actual insights from all their operations data.
M7: How does The Agency Profit podcast by Parakeeto help digital agencies make better operational decisions?
MP: When we started the podcast, we were filling a need we had ourselves. We found that there were a ton of experts in the industry talking about how to get clients, but not enough talking about what to do after you get clients in order to actually turn a profit. It was hard to find clear information about the benchmarks and KPIs that should be used to run an agency. Very few people got into the details and nuances of how those things should be measured, benchmarked, calculated, etc. We decided to create a podcast focused exclusively on those topics. Today, we have thousands of listeners all over the world, tuning in to learn how to master the art of operating and scaling a professional services business.
M7: What are some of the biggest challenges in the industry today and how does Parakeeto help their clients overcome them?
MP: One of the biggest challenges for any professional services business is being able to have forward-visibility and getting actual insights from all their operations data. Planning for the future is hard because it requires them to be able to make accurate projections about their client work, and connect that to their financial and resourcing plans. In order to do that, they need great systems for estimating client work, backed by historical data. They also need well-organized and consistent data across their operations tooling (project management, time tracking, finance, etc.) that allows them to answer their most important questions about profitability and capacity. Unfortunately, most agencies struggle with inconsistent data, poor inputs from their teams, different schemas across their tools, and many other issues that make answering simple questions burdensome and sometimes impossible. We’re out to solve this problem and help any agency improve their visibility and data cleanliness regardless of what tools and systems they’re using.
Planning for the future is hard because it requires them to be able to make accurate projections about their client work, and connect that to their financial and resourcing plans.
M7: What are some of the features offered by Parakeeto that help your clients build accurate estimates for their projects?
MP: Our product helps you do three important things:
- Import data
- Bring data from your operational tools into one place
- Clean and Normalize Data
- Parakeeto helps you clean and normalize data quickly and easily without changing the way your team uses their tools, and without affecting source data - this makes it easier to compare past projects to one another and get an insight about your agency.
- Get Insights
- While today our product focuses on estimation, we’re working on many other applications for clean operations data, like historical analysis, forecasting, real-time monitoring and alerting, and more.
M7: What is your marketing mantra to stand out in an overly saturated MarTech space?
MP: Our marketing should add more value to the world than our product ever does. Our focus is on being genuinely helpful with the content we create and being specific about the problems we can help them solve.