SunHouse Marketing is a global digital marketing agency located in Beit Shemesh, Israel, that delivers full-service marketing solutions across highly influential platforms. Their success is built on a team of specialists in the areas of areas of digital lead generation, SEO, CRO, PPC, social media, content marketing, and management and analytics. Their combined expertise has generated hundreds of thousands of leads and millions of dollars in revenue for SunHouse’s clients, located primarily in the US, Canada, and the UK. This success started with owner and managing partner Sol Jakubowicz, who founded SunHouse without the support of project management software, but soon discovered how much his team needed a reliable system to coordinate their projects and share information. He chose Teamwork Projects to assist his team, and since then, the company has grown by 65%.

“We use Teamwork Projects from launch to completion for all our projects and for every aspect of our digital marketing business. These tools have helped us create a workflow process that improved information sharing, reduced meetings — and streamlined our billing process.”

Once companies hit their stride, they face the reality that being good at what you do brings more clients, more profit, and more work. As SunHouse grew, Sol saw that they wouldn’t be able to manage projects with a few simple apps. Many of the project tasks required a team approach, depending on input from several individuals. The bulk of those tasks also had dependencies to other tasks attached, and coordinating multiple schedules to meet each deadline was unwieldy. SunHouse hired a Project Management Officer whose central job was to patrol tasks across all of the projects in order to keep everything straight and avoid bottlenecks.

“Individual team members were working in silos without a clear view of the big picture of a project. It was difficult to keep track of how individual tasks fit in overall, and things could get confusing.”

Initially, information sharing was clumsy. Without a central, cloud-based location to park all of their files and collateral, they were frequently searching for documents and data. Sol tried to solve the information gaps by having regular team meetings, but even that wasn’t enough to keep pace with the amount of detailed material everyone needed to know.

“The nature of digital marketing is constant updates, like search engine algorithms, new tools and new functionality in current tools, so it was imperative for us to have an efficient, reliable method of sharing knowledge across our team.  We tried to keep up with bi-weekly meetings, but those turned into weekly team meetings, which then turned into daily stand-ups, which really interrupted productive work hours.”

Time tracking was also difficult, even with a time tracking tool. Since the app they used at the time wasn’t connected to their basic task management software, team members had to spend a lot of time at the end of each month to review time logs. As Sol reviewed the project management software available at the time, he knew he wanted a platform that was intuitive, but offered his team tools for time tracking, collaboration, transparency, and easy access to project materials.

After reviewing several options, Sol chose Teamwork Projects over other software with similar features for the overall look and feel of the UI. He had a sense that the team would approve of the usability and get up to speed quickly.

“Teamwork Projects is very easy to use and understand. The support was awesome, too. In most cases, questions were answered in very short time, from minutes to a couple of hours — even on Sundays. Even simple questions were answered professionally.”

The first feature that SunHouse was determined to master was the built-in time tracking tool. Each team member quickly found his or her own way of working with it (or the app), which made it easier to incorporate into everyone’s daily routine. Using other features in Teamwork Projects like Links and Notebooks, teams are able to share information quickly, no matter which part of the project or team they’re working on. Everyone knows exactly where to go to find the documents or links they need, even without daily meetings and progress updates.    Thanks to the integrations the Teamwork Projects has built with other popular software, SunHouse was able to keep using some of their favorite programs like Zapier, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Calendar. Each of these interacts directly with Teamwork Projects, eliminating a lot of time-consuming work.  

The greatest advantage to signing on with Teamwork Projects was choosing software that gave the company the capacity to handle multiple simultaneous projects. While Projects can’t take all of the credit for the 65% increase in the number of projects the company is managing, it has definitely played an important role.

“I know that without Teamwork Projects, our workflows would be unable to keep all our projects on track, and collaboration would be far more difficult.”

Teamwork Projects has allowed SunHouse to reduce the number of daily stand-up meetings each week, saving everyone time without sacrificing transparency or connection among team members.

“Now we can share knowledge in a much more efficient manner, freeing us up to do more client work.”

Time tracking has not only simplified billing, it has also been an excellent tool in determining employee performance. With accurate records, managers are able to determine the actual amount of billable and non-billable hours logged daily. From there, it was easy to offer each staff member accurate, effective suggestions to improve productivity. Today, one of the top tips that Sol offers to developing entrepreneurs is this: switch to Teamwork Projects. It’s released untapped reserves of time that he didn’t know his company had — and supported SunHouse Digital Marketing through a period of of tremendous growth.

“If you’re wondering if Teamwork Projects is a good choice for your company, call me. I’ll talk you into it. Choosing this product is a no-brainer from my point of view.”