Mata Digital

The situation.

Mata Digital is a web design, development, and marketing agency. Tim Hampton launched it as a relatively new business with seven employees and a contractor network. The client work is technically demanding and the team is built around being best at what it does.

The structural problem for a young agency is that bookkeeping and payroll need to be right from very early on, but the founder is the wrong person to do them. Every hour Tim spent on Xero was an hour not on selling, building, or leading the technical team – and those hours were the ones that generated the business.

He tried it. It did not scale. Not because the work was hard, but because the founder of an agency in its make-or-break years is the single most expensive person to assign to bookkeeping tasks.

What we changed.

The bookkeeping and payroll functions moved across to Admin Army:

• Weekly Xero reconciliation
• Weekly payroll
• Accounts payable management
• Fixed asset and depreciation management

The structural change was that the agency stopped relying on the founder's bandwidth for the operational layer that has to be right every week.

The outcome.

Mata Digital grew over 400% in business size during the period of the engagement, with Tim's time focused on the selling and technical work that generates the agency's revenue.

Two follow-on signals worth noting. First, the engagement is still running. Second, Tim has put two of his other businesses – LuminateOne and Mata Property – onto the same operational engagement. Repeated voluntary use across separate businesses is the strongest signal a B2B engagement can produce.

In Tim’s words.

"Working with Admin Army has reduced our stress levels greatly. There is now a whole arm of the business we don't have to worry about, and we can focus on other parts to keep the business running."

"If all services are in house, are you trying to be an effective bookkeeping service, or are you trying to be the best at what you're good at?"