DeepSpecialization_Marcel Petitpas_EP 65_Audio_Edited_V1
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[00:00:00] Corey Quinn: Welcome to the deep specialization podcast, the show where we blend focus, strategy, and client intimacy in order to scale and simplify our businesses and our lives. I'm your host, Corey Quinn. Let's jump into the show. Today, I'm joined by the CEO and co founder of Parakeeto. Marcel Pettipa. Welcome, Marcel.
[00:00:20] Marcel Petitpas: Corey, thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to this.
[00:00:23] Corey Quinn: Likewise. Could you please introduce yourself a little bit, give us some background on who you are and what Parkeeto does?
[00:00:29] Marcel Petitpas: Sure. I'm Marcel Pettipa, CEO and co founder at Parkeeto. It's a little bit tricky to say. We can talk about how we landed on that brand.
[00:00:37] Marcel Petitpas: If you want to, we help digital agencies and professional services firms measure and improve their profitability. And we're really on a mission to help empower the owners and executives inside of these firms to go beyond the financial statements they might get every month from their accountants and really start to understand how the decisions they make every single day contribute to their profitability.
[00:00:56] Marcel Petitpas: So we have, uh, Combination of consulting services and technology that [00:01:00] we've built that helps gradually improve and build reporting capabilities within agencies. And then we help coach those clients to success and profitability improvement. So that's what I do.
[00:01:11] Corey Quinn: Beautiful. And just to reiterate, who, who do you specifically do you work with?
[00:01:16] Marcel Petitpas: Yeah. So our, most of our client base has been creative and digital agencies. So these are the folks that are building websites, running ads, creating brands, a lot of technical shops as well, building custom software or complex web applications, or doing technical support on client websites, and usually.
[00:01:34] Marcel Petitpas: They're in that one to 2 million range on the low end and that 15 to 20 million range on the high end. So it's that stage of growth where you, it's really hard to scale without having a grip on your numbers and your profitability, but you're not at a scale yet where you can go buy the enterprise tools and build a team of three people.
[00:01:54] Marcel Petitpas: To run a data operation in your organization. You're in this no man's land where there aren't really tools or frameworks to help [00:02:00] you, but you can't get away with not understanding this stuff. And that's where we want to help.
[00:02:04] Corey Quinn: Okay. Well, we're going to double click into all of that, but before we do, I'd love to learn a little bit more about you and through your journey.
[00:02:11] Corey Quinn: I know that before Parakeeto, you were an agency owner. Is that correct?
[00:02:16] Marcel Petitpas: I was agency owner. That was my first, my first real business was a business called Real Tours Media spelled R E E L tours. And we were doing real estate, virtual reality services before you could do it with your iPhone. So we'd go into houses, take a bazillion pictures, stitch them into a 3d model of the house, create waypoints and.
[00:02:36] Marcel Petitpas: And allow you to tour a house in virtual reality. And this was back, I don't even remember the year, like 2016. So like this is pre Matterport pre iPhone apps that can do this. It was very labor intensive. The other thing that was true about that time though, if you recall, was very soft real estate market, very much a buyer's market at the time.
[00:02:54] Marcel Petitpas: And so we had super tight margins and you know, I spent. Just under a year [00:03:00] trying to build that business and trying to get a grip on my numbers. And I remember thinking back then like, man, it's, this is so actually complicated and so nuanced, like figuring out how to build a business and figure out what my margins are and what costs go where and how profitable is this house that I just did a three tour of.
[00:03:15] Marcel Petitpas: But after working on that for a while, I came to the realization that like in that current business, because it was a buyer's market, I was in a place in Atlantic Canada where houses were selling for 150 grand on average. Like I couldn't make that business anything other than a hobby because there just wasn't enough gross margin to scale it.
[00:03:31] Marcel Petitpas: So I'm glad I realized that fairly early on before I locked myself into the golden handcuffs of having enough clients that I was getting paid, but not enough. Margin to actually build a business. Yeah. And I walked away from it. I then got interested in software as a service. That's how I met our mutual friend, Dan, and started doing some keynote speaking professionally and try to build a couple of tech startups.
[00:03:53] Marcel Petitpas: And of course, you know, many of those were, were failures or never really got off the ground, but it was a great learning experience. And then one day Dan [00:04:00] actually called me and he said, Hey, I've got a friend. His name's Jared. He runs a software development agency in Boise, Idaho, and he has a, a Idea for a product that every agency I've ever talked to needs that my wife, Renee, when she was running her agency, like she'd probably still be running that agency if she had this technology.
[00:04:17] Marcel Petitpas: I think that you guys should talk. Cause Dan kind of knew at that time I was looking for my next thing to work on. So I got on the phone with Jared and he explained to me, Hey, my team and I spend like almost two days a week buried in spreadsheets trying to answer these simple questions. Do we make money on clients and projects?
[00:04:33] Marcel Petitpas: Is our team utilized? When can we take on more work? Do we need to hire people? Are we pricing things correctly? There has to be a better way to do this. I want to build some tech around this. Like, Do you want to help? And I was like, man, I totally understand this. Like I've lived it. Let's go talk to some agencies and see if anybody else is dealing with this.
[00:04:53] Marcel Petitpas: And of course, everybody we talked to was like, yeah, a hundred percent, like beyond the financials that I get from my accountant, that I don't even really [00:05:00] understand those, to be honest with you. Like, I have no clue about any of this stuff that was almost six years ago now. And we haven't looked back since.
[00:05:06] Corey Quinn: And so in that customer development process where you were interviewing these agencies, how were they solving this problem? Just same thing. They were just, you know, working on spreadsheets or, you know, what was the solution back then?
[00:05:18] Marcel Petitpas: There was a very wide spectrum of solutions from burying their head in the sand.
[00:05:23] Marcel Petitpas: There's a pretty large number of people that were just kind of ignoring these things and running the business based on their gut and through pure entrepreneurial grit, chance, whatever. A lot of them were making it work and we're building businesses that we're doing, you know, millions of dollars in revenue.
[00:05:40] Marcel Petitpas: In fact, we have a client that we worked with. They were doing 6 million in top line revenue. When we first started working with them, they didn't even have an accounting system. All of their accounting was in a spreadsheet. It was crazy. Right. So it just goes to show how incredible they were.
[00:05:54] Corey Quinn: Yeah. I can think of a client like that.
[00:05:56] Corey Quinn: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Who, who've gotten to this. [00:06:00] Wonderful revenue milestone, great company, but no internal controls. And luckily for them, they've never, that hasn't created any material consequences in their life, but they realized luckily that they needed to address that head on.
[00:06:14] Marcel Petitpas: Exactly. And it's just like, I get so excited when I meet people like that, because I'm like, man, if you're doing this well without this, imagine how well you would do if you had this insight, right?
[00:06:22] Marcel Petitpas: Like how, Like, cause clearly you're talented. So there was a lot of that, just people kind of like ignoring it, not really thinking too much about it, running the business on instinct and, you know, getting through, but most of them didn't have great margins or they found that as they grew, their profitability was decreasing.
[00:06:37] Marcel Petitpas: Some people were just relying exclusively on their financials. And even if your financials are properly structured and most people aren't, there's still a lot of issues with that, mostly that it's retroactive. So, a lot of times they were looking backwards 45, 60, sometimes 90 days, and realizing, hey, we, we're not profitable, and then it's already, like, 90 days later.
[00:06:56] Marcel Petitpas: And so, there just, there wasn't a tight enough feedback loop there for them to really do [00:07:00] anything about it, or enough detail for them to understand, okay, we're not that profitable, but what do we actually do about it, and where is the issue? And then the, the kind of other two options were trying to build their own internal solutions.
[00:07:11] Marcel Petitpas: So, you know, piece together all the different tools, the time tracking, the project management, the PSAs, pull a bunch of data out into spreadsheets and, you know, have all kinds of different spreadsheets going on. Or, you know, I did talk to a couple of firms actually that had invested in many cases, like hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of, maybe they have an engineering team cause they build websites, so they build software and they've built their own homegrown solution on top of a Salesforce or an SAP.
[00:07:37] Marcel Petitpas: And when I really quizzed them about it, like, It was costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars to build and maintain these systems over time. And a lot of times they still weren't happy with them. Like it was this never ending pet project of like, Oh yeah, we're still trying to tweak it. And I'm like, how long have you been working on this thing?
[00:07:52] Marcel Petitpas: Four years. Oh yeah. And all of your unutilized time goes towards this thing. Wow. That must be really expensive. How do you feel about that? But [00:08:00] at the end of the day, nobody had really solved this. And there was two components that nobody had really solved it on. The first was the framework, and that's a really important one.
[00:08:10] Marcel Petitpas: And I'm sure many people listening to this have experienced this before. You can go out and Google the benchmarks and metrics that you need to track for your agency, and you'll get a lot of the same answers. You know, you need to understand your gross margin or delivery margin. You need to understand your, you know, your utilization rate.
[00:08:24] Marcel Petitpas: You need to understand your average billable rate. Let's take one of those metrics, utilization rate, really popular one. What exactly is a utilization rate? There's two components in it. We have a billable hour and we have someone's capacity. Well, let's specifically define those things. What exactly is a billable hour and what's not.
[00:08:43] Marcel Petitpas: And if you ask 10 different agencies, you usually get 10 different answers is working on the company website. When things are slow, a billable hour in some agencies, it is. And then other agencies, it's not the time that you worked on that client project, but you didn't build to them because you messed something up or it was the intern that was doing it.
[00:08:59] Marcel Petitpas: Or [00:09:00] is that a billable hour? Or is it not? Well, in some firms it is, in other firms it's not. And then you will go to capacity. What exactly is someone's capacity? Does it include holidays? What about sick time? What about the non billable time? What about, you know, the, the company offsite that we do three times a year?
[00:09:15] Marcel Petitpas: There's a lot of weeds here. And so, like, you need to make very deliberate decisions about every single one of those micro questions because it changes the entire system. Because if you calculate utilization a slightly different way, you now need to reconsider average billable rate, Project margins, delivery margin, overhead budgets.
[00:09:31] Marcel Petitpas: All of these things are interconnected. So that was the thing that nobody had solved. And we didn't even realize needed to be solved until many years later, but I digress. And then the other side was actually building the thing to track all this.
[00:09:45] Corey Quinn: So it's framework and tracking.
[00:09:46] Marcel Petitpas: Yeah,
[00:09:47] Corey Quinn: I think, you know, I'm just kind of a meta comment as you're, as you're going through this, like this, you know, you, you're, parakeeto is a great example of.
[00:09:57] Corey Quinn: A business that has specialized in solving [00:10:00] a very unique and specific problem for a specific type of buyer. In this case, it is the, you know, it's the agency owner is the buyer in this, you know, this specific situation. And the specific problem is not having a financial system or a financial model That really ultimately supports their growth.
[00:10:19] Marcel Petitpas: Yeah. So. That's exactly right.
[00:10:21] Corey Quinn: What are, what are some of the consequences that you saw that those agencies, maybe they were, you know, their head in the sand or, or they were trying to do their own homegrown situation where they, you know, they were really missing the framework and the tracking. What are, what are the consequences that, that agencies who haven't figured this out, what, what are they facing?
[00:10:38] Marcel Petitpas: Most of the time, the long and short of it is they're not as profitable as they want to be. And of course they feel that on the bottom line, but the other thing that it does to them often is it constrains them from a cash flow perspective. And I really believe in focusing on what we call delivery margin.
[00:10:53] Marcel Petitpas: And if you have an accounting background, you can think of this as like gross margin or contribution margin. It's like when we sell something to [00:11:00] the client, and then we do it for them. How much cash is left over that we can then choose to invest in. Sales and marketing, invest in administration, invest in like building infrastructure, growing the business, or pull out as free cashflow for the owners and shareholders of the business.
[00:11:17] Marcel Petitpas: And the key thing here is the higher that gross margin is or the higher that delivery margin is, the more optionality you have to make deliberate decisions about that. Most of the founders that we talked to that didn't have a grip on this stuff. They just felt like the business was happening to them, not for them.
[00:11:32] Marcel Petitpas: They saw all of their overhead spending as a cost and not an investment. They didn't feel like they had optionality around those things. There was no deliberateness to those investments and the profit that they got at the end of the year just felt like happenstance and luck to them and they didn't have any sense of control over it.
[00:11:47] Marcel Petitpas: And that was both financially, of course, expensive to them because there's a lot of opportunity costs that they didn't realize was being left on the table. But also it's very emotionally. Expensive because it makes this already very [00:12:00] challenging experience of running a service based business exponentially more difficult when you're worried about, are we going to be able to cover payroll?
[00:12:08] Marcel Petitpas: How is it possible that we're busier than we've ever been? And yet there's no cashflow in the business. How is it possible that we've done more revenue than we've ever done? And yet we have no profit left over to compensate ourselves. Those are the kinds of things that we were hearing.
[00:12:19] Corey Quinn: So for the listeners who are nodding their heads, why don't we get into some of the things that can help them sort of move through this and get to a different situation.
[00:12:28] Corey Quinn: First question I have for you is, you know, what type of financial model do you recommend for a professional services firm?
[00:12:35] Marcel Petitpas: The one that your accountant's not going to like. So we'll start there. There are, we, we get to see a lot of PNLs at Parakeeto. It's one of the first things that we do when we work with a new client is we build a financial model of their business so we can see what the business is capable of based on the current design.
[00:12:51] Marcel Petitpas: And then we look at their financial performance and we compare it to that model so that we can identify where, you They are performing under what the business is designed to do. [00:13:00] And the most common issues that we see with profit and loss statements for an agency, which leads to the founder not having, or the executive team not having insight into what's really going on is number one, there isn't a clear separation between revenue and what we call agency gross income.
[00:13:16] Marcel Petitpas: And so the key idea there is you might be collecting a lot of revenue from a client, but oftentimes, depending on the services that you sell, especially if you sell things like advertising or media buys, or you do video production, or you've designed your business such that there are core Functions that you operate internally, and there are things that you partner with other vendors for and deliberately push outside your four walls, you might have a significant portion of that revenue that is what we consider passed through expenses.
[00:13:43] Marcel Petitpas: And so that money passes through your entity into someone else's. firm or into someone else's business, and you don't have control over the profitability of that money, and it really never belonged to you in the first place. But if we're not very deliberate about isolating those paths through expenses and subtracting them from revenue to [00:14:00] arrive at agency gross income, which is the true measure of how much revenue we are collecting as a business that we now need to earn.
[00:14:06] Marcel Petitpas: And we need to benchmark our performance against, then it can create a false sense of how big our business is, and it can create a false anchor for profitability and for spending decisions. And it can be quite dangerous. And the extreme example that I'll often use for this is, let's imagine Airbnb thought that their revenue was 1.
[00:14:24] Marcel Petitpas: All of the money that you put down when you book somebody's house for a vacation instead of the 15 percent cut that they actually take. Imagine if they made spending decisions and evaluated their business based on that top line number. It would be crazy, right? But I know that there's probably a firm listening to this that charges 15 percent of ad spend.
[00:14:44] Marcel Petitpas: And they might be looking at their business as the 20 million business, which is all the ad spend instead of the 15 percent cut that actually belongs to them. So that's the first critically important thing. A lot of PNLs are doing that, but the thing that's misleading about it is those passenger expenses are being [00:15:00] considered cost of goods sold.
[00:15:01] Marcel Petitpas: And that's fine. There's a lot of different ways to isolate those. But what that leads to is the gross profit line on the PNL is actually agency gross income, but it's called gross profit. And there's often not a very deliberate conversation to say, this is not actually your gross profit. So that can be misleading.
[00:15:19] Marcel Petitpas: Yeah.
[00:15:19] Corey Quinn: Right.
[00:15:20] Marcel Petitpas: Correct.
[00:15:20] Corey Quinn: That's necessarily right. I understand. So
[00:15:22] Marcel Petitpas: that's the first major thing.
[00:15:23] Corey Quinn: And then how do you get to sort of delivery margin as a sort of a percent?
[00:15:29] Marcel Petitpas: Yeah. So the first step is we need to isolate pasture expenses and subtract those out from our revenue. That leaves us with agency gross income.
[00:15:36] Marcel Petitpas: Now, the next step is we need to figure out what does it cost us to earn that agency gross income. So to zoom out conceptually, most of the time, when we sell something to a client, we make a promise to them. They agree to pay us a certain amount of money. And most contracts are written such that until we deliver on that promise.
[00:15:55] Marcel Petitpas: The money doesn't actually belong to us. And the cost that we incur to fulfill that [00:16:00] promise to the client is usually going to be mostly time. That's the business model that we're in. We have skilled labor on our team. It might be us. It might be our team. We need to deploy that skilled labor. We complete deliverables.
[00:16:10] Marcel Petitpas: And then that AGI becomes ours. And delivery margin is essentially the ratio of dollars that are left over after we've fulfilled The promise to the client relative to what we originally got paid. So for example, if I get paid a dollar from a client and it cost me 50 cents to get the thing done that I said I was going to get done for them, that means I have 50 cents left over.
[00:16:30] Marcel Petitpas: Therefore I have a 50 percent delivery margin and that is the objective on the profit and loss statement is we want to have 50 percent or more of every dollar of AGI that we get paid from clients. Left to pay for overhead and have a profit. And the way that we figure that out is we need to isolate what we call delivery expenses.
[00:16:48] Marcel Petitpas: And so delivery expenses is defined as the costs that are associated with running the delivery function within your business. Most of that is going to be payroll and some of it is going to be what we [00:17:00] call shared delivery expenses. That might be software products. That, you know, are not just for one client, but your team uses to get things done.
[00:17:06] Marcel Petitpas: If you run a design firm, it's Figma. If you run an ad agency, you might have some like ad management or creative, you know, AI tools or whatever. Right? So all that stuff lumped together is your delivery costs. But here's the mistake I see most people making on the P and L all of their payroll is in one big account.
[00:17:21] Marcel Petitpas: And everyone's in there. There is no separation between who's for delivery and who's not, or people that are split. We're not splitting them. And the same thing is true for software or dues and subscriptions. It's all in one big account. And we're not differentiating between is this software for sales? Is it for delivery?
[00:17:36] Marcel Petitpas: Is it for admin? And those are important things to start parsing apart. If we want to have clarity on our delivery margin, which to me is the single most important metric that we should be aware of in our business.
[00:17:47] Corey Quinn: What happens when you have a founder who is involved in sales, which is obviously directly tied to, you know, generating the, the revenue.
[00:17:57] Corey Quinn: Where does that, where does that lie with, with regard to [00:18:00] delivery costs?
[00:18:01] Marcel Petitpas: Well, the way we want to treat every individual, and this is the part that accountants listening to this are not going to like, because it's a lot more work and it's, and owners are not going to like it either because it's a lot more expensive.
[00:18:13] Marcel Petitpas: And so I would make the argument that maybe you don't want to do this directly in your accounting software. Maybe you want to pull your PNL out and you want to create management reports separately, which is a very common practice. If you have a, if you are separating tax based accounting from management accounting, which have two very different purposes, but I digress.
[00:18:30] Marcel Petitpas: The way we would treat every individual, not just the owner, but anybody is we look at their compensation. And for owners, the important thing, because a lot of people want to pay themselves more in dividends for tax efficiency reason, or run a bunch of personal expenses to the business. That's all fine.
[00:18:44] Marcel Petitpas: But what we want to represent in our management accounting is what does it actually cost to fill this job that I'm doing as the founder? If I'm the CEO of a 2 million agency, what's a fair market compensation for me? Call it 200 grand, 250 grand. That's probably reasonable. Like if an acquirer looked at [00:19:00] that, would they say that's wrong?
[00:19:01] Marcel Petitpas: That's probably, they'd be like, okay, that, that passes the sniff test. Let's put that number in our model. And then let's look at what percentage of my job is delivering stuff for clients. And if it's zero, 0 percent of my salary goes into that delivery cost bucket. And then we ask ourselves, what percentage of my time is for sales and marketing?
[00:19:19] Marcel Petitpas: Let's say it's 75%, 75 percent of my compensation now goes into a sales and marketing bucket on the P and L as a cost. And then the other 25 percent is admin. We put 25 percent there. That's how we want to treat everybody on the team. And the majority of the team, they're going to be a hundred percent allocated to delivery.
[00:19:35] Marcel Petitpas: Not all of their time is going to be billable. But their job is going to be 100%. Like you come in every day and your primary thing is to be a part of the delivery team. And then there will be some people that are split and there is operational cost and complexity if you want to structure your accounting that way, unfortunately, but it is more accurate.
[00:19:52] Corey Quinn: Where does what from a, from a percent of. Agency gross income. What, what, how much [00:20:00] should sales and marketing represent?
[00:20:02] Marcel Petitpas: That is a great question. The general benchmark is eight to 14%, but that is a very, very rough rule of thumb. If you have a 70 percent delivery margin on the PNL and you want to spend 30 percent on sales and marketing.
[00:20:17] Marcel Petitpas: Go for it. That's your call. You get to choose if you want that to be profit or you want to be growth. So the benchmark is 8 to 40 percent on sales and marketing, 8 to 14 percent on admin, 0 to 6 percent on facilities and rent, that kind of stuff. 0 percent being like you're a remote team, so that just isn't an expense for you.
[00:20:35] Marcel Petitpas: In aggregate, You want to try to get your overhead spending across those three categories to within 30 percent of agency gross income if you had to. Right. But again, that's where the, if you have strong gross margins and you want to choose to over invest in growth, you can go and do that. And as long as I like to use the rule of 40, as long as your net profit and your growth rate are Are 40 percent or higher [00:21:00] than you're in a healthy spot.
[00:21:01] Marcel Petitpas: So it is reasonable and you know, not unusual to say, I'm going to borrow from my profit this year to invest in growth in hopes that the bet is I'm going to get more profit out later. That's okay. That's your prerogative as a founder, but it should feel like a choice. And it feels like a choice when you have the gross margin to make that choice.
[00:21:17] Corey Quinn: So we talked a little bit about this idea of utilization and how it's a combination of the billable hour and your capacity. How do you introduce the idea of tracking hours into an agency such that it doesn't immediately create a lot of resistance?
[00:21:33] Marcel Petitpas: It's a great question. I think if you're starting from a place of, the team is already defensive about it, so maybe you tried it in the past, it didn't go well, or you've hired a bunch of people that have worked in industry before and wherever they worked before they had a bad experience.
[00:21:48] Marcel Petitpas: It wasn't being used in a morally. well intentioned way, then I would start by picking a problem in the organization, the time tracking can effectively solve. [00:22:00] So perfect example of this is here's a team that is constantly getting caught off guard by deadlines. They're having to work evenings and weekends to hit those deadlines because, you know, we, we didn't scope things properly.
[00:22:12] Marcel Petitpas: Fires came up, but it's a pattern now. And so you go to that team and you say, We got to fix this. Like, it's not cool that you guys are having to work so many evenings and weekends and all this overtime. Like, how do we get a grip on this? Can you facilitate that conversation? It's very hard to imagine that that conversation is going to go anywhere, but it might be helpful if we had a better idea of how long it was going to take to get things done.
[00:22:34] Marcel Petitpas: Like, it seems like that's what we're missing every time. We've tried changing the price. We've tried, you know, fixing the, the, the relationship we have with the client and the account management practice, but like it just keeps happening. So, okay. Do we know how long it takes to get things done today? Well, no, actually we don't, we don't really know.
[00:22:51] Marcel Petitpas: Okay, cool. Well, maybe we should like, just start to build that data set and then that'll help us when we're scoping the next one. to get to a more realistic [00:23:00] place, give ourselves enough time and like maybe we could start. So you just like pick a problem and treat it like a test and really try to navigate that conversation such that it becomes the team's idea and they suggest it or at the very least they're like, Oh yeah, that makes sense.
[00:23:15] Marcel Petitpas: Like let's treat it as a test. You don't roll it out across the whole company. You don't say we're going to do this forever. You go, Hey, maybe this will help us fix this problem. And you prove it out. And then a light bulb goes off in their head of like, well, this is actually pretty useful. Like, Oh, we realized that We consistently go over in this area or we dramatically underestimated this particular phase of the project or what have you and you make adjustments and then you find the next thing.
[00:23:39] Marcel Petitpas: And once you start to build that trust within the team of actually using the data to make their lives better. That's how you develop the momentum to roll this out across the company. And the thing that I didn't mention explicitly in here, but I think is actually the key to this is you're closing the loop.
[00:23:56] Marcel Petitpas: You're not just telling people track your time and then they track it and [00:24:00] then they have no idea what's happening with that data or how you're looking at it or what decisions you make based on it. You close the loop. So they are involved in the conversations around that data and they can see how it impacts your decision making.
[00:24:11] Marcel Petitpas: That is the key in this.
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[00:25:30] Corey Quinn: What's an example of that? Like, what, what would, how would you share with them? What, what are you sharing as it relates to the data that you're collecting from a time tracking perspective?
[00:25:39] Marcel Petitpas: Yeah. One of my favorite things to do actually is another scenario that I run into a lot is a firm that is tracking time, but they're having compliance issues and they're trying all kinds of things to try and get the team to like track their time more, but the team just like, they just don't get why it's important.
[00:25:54] Marcel Petitpas: You know, they're just not engaged and they're like, And I'm like, well, you need to close the loop. You need to get that data in front of your [00:26:00] team. And they're like, well, I can't because the data is not good. It's not accurate. So like, what am I going to talk to them about? I'm like, that's exactly why you should sit down and pretend that you don't know that it's not accurate.
[00:26:08] Marcel Petitpas: And so they sit down and they go, wow, this is incredible. We spent half as much time on all of these projects than we expected to. The clients are thrilled. The work is great. We can sell twice as many of these now. And you guys like, won't even be that busy. Yeah. And watch what happens to the team. They're going to go, Oh, hold on, boss.
[00:26:26] Marcel Petitpas: Like, I might have forgot to put some time in. Like, it might have taken me longer to do that. And so, the pendulum will swing too much. Then they'll log too much time on the next one. That's my next question.
[00:26:36] Corey Quinn: What happens when you have the team that's overprotective over their time?
[00:26:40] Marcel Petitpas: So, give me an example of the team that's
[00:26:42] Corey Quinn: overprotective.
[00:26:42] Corey Quinn: So, let's say, maybe, maybe overprotective is not the right adjective, but The team that doesn't want to work too hard, meaning that they may cushion the amount of hours that they report on being able to provide a certain outcome within their job description.
[00:26:57] Marcel Petitpas: Yeah. So in that case, so one [00:27:00] of my favorite reports to look at is what we call the average billable rate report and the average billable rate report.
[00:27:05] Marcel Petitpas: It's one of the kind of three main levers of improving agency profitability. But what we're looking at is how much do we get paid by a client? How many hours did we spend on the job? And therefore, what was the amount of money that we earn for each hour invested? And then you can just start to compare things.
[00:27:20] Marcel Petitpas: Clients, projects, maybe teams across the company. And you always want to compare it to what was expected when you first, like, quoted out the job. So, I expected to make 150, but we spent too much time, so we actually ended up at 120. And then you sit down with a team. And you just go, Hey, here's what happened.
[00:27:40] Marcel Petitpas: It took us a lot longer than we expected. What did we miss? Is there something getting in your way? Is there something inefficient going on here that about our process that we can address? What ideas do you have? And you just engage them in the conversation around improving the average billable rate of the business.
[00:27:57] Marcel Petitpas: And. Over time, as you start to [00:28:00] really have a lot of these conversations and people start to understand how this stuff works, this is what you could start to do. Like the team comes to you and they're like, Hey, you know, we'd like to do a four day work week and you can go cool. We can do that. That's going to lower our utilization by 20%.
[00:28:14] Marcel Petitpas: It's going to cost us a million dollars next year and a revenue opportunity. How much do we need to increase our average billable rate? In order for us to pay for that out of the client, essentially, instead of our bottom line. Oh, we got to get our average bill rate from 150 to 170. Do you guys think you can find the efficiencies, create additional value so we can get to that level of efficiency?
[00:28:35] Marcel Petitpas: And if you can do it, We'll give you a Friday's off from now on. Sound good. And now it's up to them to go figure out, okay, how do we get, you know, in this case, it's like 25 percent more efficient and everything that we do. It's just like, you can get everybody on the same side of the table. So that's how I would approach it is if they're over servicing on clients or they're padding hours, then.
[00:28:52] Marcel Petitpas: We just sit down and we go, Hey, what's going on here? What can we learn about this? And you show them what decisions and what questions you're [00:29:00] asking around the data. And you have to take into consideration that there's average bill rate, there's utilization, and the pendulum is going to swing depending on how much you over index on one metric over the other.
[00:29:10] Marcel Petitpas: But if you're going to over index on anything, I would over index on average billable rate. I would much rather have a utilization that's lower than my target. But have a higher average billable rate. That's a great situation rather than utilizations maxed out, but we're not earning as much revenue as we want per hour.
[00:29:25] Marcel Petitpas: That's a much tougher situation.
[00:29:27] Corey Quinn: What I love about this is you're taking it out of the realm of opinions and you're, and you're using data to guide these conversations. It becomes a lot less personal
[00:29:37] Marcel Petitpas: and it's so much more productive because you don't go into a project retro and spend the whole thing arguing about what happened.
[00:29:43] Marcel Petitpas: You just agree on what happened and then you all sit around the table and say, let's get curious about how we can learn from this and get and move forward and achieve our mutual objectives out of this. So that is, that is the key. I'm, I'm glad you called that out.
[00:29:56] Corey Quinn: What role does productizing a service play [00:30:00] in this whole kind of equation around utilization and capacity?
[00:30:05] Marcel Petitpas: Great question. Productizing a service Basically can make achieving utilization targets much easier because you have a much more predictable scope to work. The other thing that it does that I think is most important is it can really improve average billable rate and it can improve average billable rates by essentially allowing you to stretch that metric from both sides.
[00:30:29] Marcel Petitpas: So if we think about what, what is the calculation for average billable rate? Again, it's agency gross income demanded by divided by the amount of hours that we Had to spend to get this thing done. So what's powerful about productization? Well, the first is that often you're going to be developing a service or an offer that is specific to a problem and a customer, and because it's so specific to them, their perception of the value of that thing is going to be higher.
[00:30:53] Marcel Petitpas: And the reason for that is often it creates a higher sense of confidence in them that you're actually going to solve the problem or get the [00:31:00] outcome for them that they want, because it's so clear. Like we. Solve this problem or get this outcome for this kind of client. And this is our process for doing it.
[00:31:08] Marcel Petitpas: So you could probably increase the amount of AGI that you get paid for the same scope of work. So that's going to improve your average billable rate. But then the second thing that it does is because you have a repeatable process. Now you have this surface area where every time that you find a way to save 10 percent of the amount of time that it used to take you to do that thing, because you have a better template.
[00:31:28] Marcel Petitpas: You have a little automation that you tool up. You maybe build some tech. You may be fine, right? That compounds over time. You get to benefit from that process improvement every single time that you sell something to a client. So if we do the math on this, like, well, well, actually just to articulate how powerful this is, let's say you have a 10, 000 service that you sell, but because you productized it, now you can sell it for 15, 000 instead.
[00:31:53] Marcel Petitpas: Or maybe let's be a little more conservative. 25 percent increase. You go to 12, 500. If that service used to take you. [00:32:00] 100 hours to do. You went from 100 ABR to 125 ABR. And then let's say instead of taking 100 hours to do it, you can drop that by 20%. So you go down to 80 hours. Now we're going to divide 1250 by 80.
[00:32:17] Marcel Petitpas: We now have 156 average billable rate. Let's say you have a team of 20 people, 2080 hours apiece. Your utilization rate, 60%. So 20 80 multiplied by 20 is 41, 600 hours. 60 percent of those are for client delivery. 156 an hour is 3. 8 million compared to our average billable rate before, which was a hundred dollars an hour.
[00:32:46] Marcel Petitpas: So if we did that math times 60 multiplied by 100, I'm doing this all in real time. So we just increased from 2. 4 million in revenue that we could earn with that team at a hundred [00:33:00] dollars an hour, average billable rate. To now with that team of 20 people working at 60 percent utilization, 3. 8 million. So we've added 1.
[00:33:10] Marcel Petitpas: 4
[00:33:11] Corey Quinn: million. There you go.
[00:33:11] Marcel Petitpas: Think about that. None of our other costs have changed. That's all profit. I mean, you could invest more in overhead, but that's what we were talking about earlier, right? This is the impact. And that's just one metric. We didn't change utilization and we haven't even looked at average cost per hour yet.
[00:33:23] Marcel Petitpas: So. You know, we get into that if because these things are so symmetrical, because we know exactly what kind of skill sets we need, we can get our utilization up by a couple percentage points. And then because we're developing these tight processes, instead of having a really experienced senior person do all the work, because there's so much uncertainty and they need all that judgment, we can now start to get lower cost labor doing more of those things.
[00:33:44] Marcel Petitpas: And we squeeze our margin from all three of those vectors. I mean, you could be talking about taking a firm that's basically breaking even to doing a 40 percent EBITDA. If you can work on those things over a little while. So productization is not the only [00:34:00] answer to achieving those things. There are ways to achieve those things in every billing model, but it does, it does offer a very compelling set of circumstances to make that much easier than it otherwise would be if we were selling things that were much more fluid, much more bespoke, and we would be much more constrained in terms of the opportunities that we have to very quickly improve profitability.
[00:34:20] Corey Quinn: That is awesome.
[00:34:21] Marcel Petitpas: What do you think? Did I, did I do a good job of articulating that?
[00:34:25] Corey Quinn: Yeah.
[00:34:26] Marcel Petitpas: Are you going to clip that out for social?
[00:34:28] Corey Quinn: Yeah, I think that we just need to let that sink in here. One shortcut or one, one sort of tool set that I know agency founders love is to think about this idea of benchmarking and having sort of benchmarks that they should measure their progress against.
[00:34:43] Corey Quinn: What are some, some ways that, or techniques for creating benchmarks or comparing projects and departments effectively?
[00:34:51] Marcel Petitpas: So I have mixed feelings about benchmarks. It is something that people ask for a lot. And in my experience, when a client comes to me asking about [00:35:00] benchmarks, when I double click on that question, what they're really asking is like, are we performing well?
[00:35:06] Marcel Petitpas: And a lot of times, depending on how you've structured your business, the benchmark might not help you answer that question at all. In fact, it might just make you feel like you're performing well when you're not, or like you're performing poorly when you're not. You're also not performing poorly. And the reason that that's problematic, or the reason that I think that happens is a lot of benchmarks are expressed in terms of absolute numbers.
[00:35:27] Marcel Petitpas: So let's take one of my least favorite benchmarks of all time, revenue per full time employee. I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with the metric of Revenue per full time employee. It can be a very useful proxy for delivery margin, actually, when it's expressed as a relative value, right?
[00:35:42] Marcel Petitpas: So what is a good revenue per full time employee? Well, if we understand that we want to have, you know, roughly a 50 percent delivery margin, then a healthy revenue per full time employee would be roughly double what your average salary per employee is. That would be a useful way to [00:36:00] talk about that benchmark.
[00:36:01] Marcel Petitpas: But the way we talk about it in the industry, or the way I see it being talked about in the industry is 100k is bad, 175k is okay, 250 plus is good. But, it's like, well, if my team is in the Philippines, and their average salary is 40 grand, then 100k is still fine, actually. And if my team is in San Francisco, and they all get paid 2, 000, 200, 000, then two 50 is not good actually.
[00:36:26] Marcel Petitpas: So it's just, there's more nuance to it. So that's the first thing I'll say around benchmarks is really think about like, is this a relative value? The benchmarks that are important at a fundamental level are having a delivery margin or a gross profit of 50 percent or plus, or more on the benchmark. The P and L and having an EBIT of 20 percent or more.
[00:36:44] Marcel Petitpas: Those are the things you want to aim for. When we talk about the levers for that average billable rate, you want to generally have an average billable rate that is at least three times your average cost per hour. So if you look at your entire team and the salaries that they get paid, and you divide that by the amount of hours that you buy from them every year, [00:37:00] for most people, that's 2080.
[00:37:02] Marcel Petitpas: And let's say you have a average cost per hour of 40. Then you want to have at least 120 average billable rate. If you want to benchmark that against the industry and you want to figure out, like, am I charging as much as everybody else? Then you can go get benchmarking data for that. What I could tell you is in North America, it's around one 65, but there's a huge spread on that.
[00:37:23] Marcel Petitpas: Some people charge way more than that. Some people charge way less. And then the other thing that's nuanced about this is that's what their rate is. When they price something, what do they actually earn often? Very different.
[00:37:34] Corey Quinn: Right. So is that useful? We'll see. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:37:37] Marcel Petitpas: Right. The second thing is utilization.
[00:37:39] Marcel Petitpas: Again, utilization. It's like I've seen firms that were 80 percent utilized and weren't profitable because their other metrics were not in check. I've seen firms that are 25 percent utilized and are profitable. Because they found ways to pay for it elsewhere. They have great average billable rates. They have low average cost per hours.
[00:37:55] Marcel Petitpas: Their, their overhead is in check. They're making it work. So again, not really any [00:38:00] benchmarks around that, but I will give you some figures if you want to think about, like, if I'm charging about the same as everybody else, I'm paying about the same as everybody else for labor. And I'm spending about the same as everybody else, relatively speaking on overhead.
[00:38:12] Marcel Petitpas: You generally want your entire team to be able to come out to a net annual utilization of 50 percent or more. So that is everyone on the team, including people that don't do any work for clients. After you strip out all of the holidays, vacation time, sick time, et cetera. The absolute number of hours that they spend working for clients.
[00:38:29] Marcel Petitpas: You want it to be hopefully 50 percent of the total amount of time you buy from everybody or more. And if we're looking at individual contributors, you generally want to set that weekly expectation at anywhere from 70 to 90%. And so that means 28 to on the high end, 36 hours per week. That's before we account for things like they're going to need time off and vacation time and holidays.
[00:38:52] Marcel Petitpas: And they might work on internal things as well. And. The level to which you can kind of set that expectation of [00:39:00] delivery hours is going to be largely determined by what I call context dilution. So if you have a software developer, they get to come into work every day and work on the same project eight hours a day, five days a week for nine months, you could probably ask them to do 36 delivery hours a week.
[00:39:16] Marcel Petitpas: They're probably not going to be that stressed. But if you have a project manager that has to deal with 40 different clients at a time, and they're bouncing around between a million things every day, 25 billable hours a week, they're going to be burnt out probably and tell you how stressed they are and overworked they are.
[00:39:29] Marcel Petitpas: And you're going to look at their time sheets and say, I don't understand. That's what's going on. There is context dilution. You have to take that into account.
[00:39:36] Corey Quinn: There's a high cost of context switching.
[00:39:39] Marcel Petitpas: There is. There is a lot of mental, mental shrapnel as well from just having all of those different things bouncing around in your brain at any given moment.
[00:39:48] Corey Quinn: It's the opposite of what Cal Newport talks about in deep work.
[00:39:52] Marcel Petitpas: Correct. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So those are some benchmarks. I don't really have one for average cost per hour. It's just way too hard to [00:40:00] benchmark because it's like, well, what kind of work are you doing? What kind of skill sets do you need? And again, the benchmark there is try to keep it to less than a third of your average billable rate.
[00:40:10] Marcel Petitpas: If you can do that consistently, then you should be fine.
[00:40:12] Corey Quinn: Beautiful. Before we move on to another topic, is there anything else that we should cover as relates to measuring and improving profitability?
[00:40:22] Marcel Petitpas: There's a lot we could cover. The one thing that I'll say here is pricing is something that a lot of people have questions about.
[00:40:28] Marcel Petitpas: And the thing that I'm shocked by, you know, I talked to, I don't know, half a dozen agency owners every week on a consultation calls. I asked them all the same question. How do you arrive at a price for a client? 90 percent of them give me the same answer, which is, well, we figure out how many hours we think it's going to take.
[00:40:48] Marcel Petitpas: Often we'll look at stuff we've done before, you know, triangulate based off of that. And then we will multiply it by. Either a blended agency rate or like a rate card that we have set, and it doesn't matter [00:41:00] if they're actually like showing that to the client or not internally. Their mental model is hours multiplied by dollars, and I'm like, okay, cool, and what's the margin that you expect to make on that hour or on that rate that you set?
[00:41:13] Marcel Petitpas: And I'm often met with a blank stare. I've never thought about that before. I'm like, interesting. So if we can understand that on the profit and loss statement, The most important thing is that we have a healthy gross profit or a healthy delivery margin as we call it, but we don't know what that looks like when we sell something that's probably an issue.
[00:41:36] Marcel Petitpas: And maybe by chance, we just happened to have set our rate at a level that we're setting ourselves up for success. And sometimes I see that happen. Should we be guessing about that? No. So the thing I want to articulate to everyone is whatever your target is on the PNL. Add 20 percent to it. That's what you need to target when you price something.
[00:41:54] Marcel Petitpas: So if you sell an hour of time, figure out what your average cost per hour is. And the [00:42:00] formula is whatever I'm charging minus my delivery costs divided by whatever I'm charging. So if you have an average billable rate target that you bill out to clients on an hourly basis of one 50, And you have a 40 average cost per hour, that's a delivery margin of 73%, a direct delivery margin on whatever you're selling.
[00:42:17] Marcel Petitpas: That's great. If you have a productized service, you sell it for 10, 000 and it costs you 4, 000 in delivery, like internal delivery costs. To get that done, that's a delivery margin of 60%. It doesn't matter what your billing model is. It doesn't matter if it's project based or retainer. It doesn't matter if you're selling hours, sprints, products, outcomes, percentage of ad spend, you know, a certain commission on leads.
[00:42:42] Marcel Petitpas: You want to figure out how much do I expect to get paid in agency gross income? And what do I think it's going to cost me to get that done? And make sure that you're setting a floor on that price. That allows you to ideally get to 70 percent or more at the direct project or client level so that you can end up at 50 percent or more on the P and L.[00:43:00]
[00:43:00] Marcel Petitpas: So that's like the simple, the one like piece of math you just should do every time you price something.
[00:43:05] Corey Quinn: Yeah. Even I imagine even if you go with more of a value based. Approach, you know, you still want to understand what are the, what are the, so the, the metrics and the, and the margin built into that.
[00:43:17] Marcel Petitpas: 100%.
[00:43:18] Marcel Petitpas: And I love that you brought that up. The objective of value based pricing is to increase your margin. So if you don't know if it's actually doing that or not, like you're missing the point. Right. And like, right. I've had this conversation a lot of times where it's like, Well, we don't track our time or our costs or pay attention to that because we price based on value now.
[00:43:36] Marcel Petitpas: And it's just like, but how do you know if it's working? Like, sure, you might be charging more, but if you have a relative increase in costs, like you're not winning, there is no benefit to this for you actually. And I've seen it go the other way where they're not pricing the risk in and they lose the best more times than they win it where they're like, well, shit, we switched to value based pricing.
[00:43:53] Marcel Petitpas: We're charging way more money, but we're losing our shirt on all these projects. And it's taking us so much time. And it's like, Yeah, because you didn't [00:44:00] think about the cost and the risk. The risk is important. Like, can you predict how much time it's going to take to get something done? And can you price the risk in?
[00:44:09] Marcel Petitpas: And if you can't, there is actually a very strong and a very valid argument for selling time. If you don't know how much time it's going to take, you should probably sell time. That's again, value of productization is it can help you start to create consistency around what the cost investment is to get things done.
[00:44:25] Corey Quinn: Beautiful. Transitioning a little bit to this idea of moving out of the direct context that a lot of agencies operate in, which is just a service provider and thinking it through more of a lens of a strategic ally. What are your thoughts on that?
[00:44:43] Marcel Petitpas: So I think that this is where so many things are heading.
[00:44:47] Marcel Petitpas: The zeitgeist like we're, you know, April of 2024, so the zeitgeist around AI has cooled off a little bit, but like it's still there. The undercurrent of it. It's still there. It's still there. It's going to new [00:45:00] like we're going to get amazed by it many, many more times over the next couple of decades. And what I think that this is creating, it's already started to create is a real parting of the seas where as a service provider, as a person that runs a professional services business, you are very much going to be forced to pick a lane.
[00:45:15] Marcel Petitpas: Are you going to be An execution based firm checks boxes and delivers widgets and like does grunt work for clients. And that is going to become an increasingly competitive game. That is all about efficiency. You can build a successful business there, but is your skillset, efficiency operations, like really having all these things dialed.
[00:45:37] Marcel Petitpas: If you're still listening to this podcast episode, probably not. Right. Or are you going to become a strategic. Like high value partner that helps your clients understand things at a more nuanced and a more fundamental level and allows them to make use and extract more value from all of these incredible tools and all of these [00:46:00] incredible resources that are out there to help them create widgets and execute on things, right?
[00:46:05] Marcel Petitpas: It's the question of like, it's not the execution, but the strategy that is really going to determine if someone is successful. One of the things that Dan actually said to me one day that really resonated was when a client hires you, they are now outsourcing the innovation of that part of their business to you.
[00:46:23] Marcel Petitpas: Can they trust you with that innovation? Are you going to be a steward of keeping them on the cutting edge for that thing that you now own within their business? And I think that that's a really useful way to frame it. If that's the position that you want to be in where you will Create more value. You should get paid more for that value, and you should be able to maintain longer client relationships because You're not going to get replaced by the more cost effective solution Which if your client is if you're selling widgets and you're delivering deliverables and there is a cheaper option that delivers the same outcome It's your client's fiscal responsibility to fire you and [00:47:00] hire that thing.
[00:47:00] Marcel Petitpas: That is the right thing for them to do You might have a good relationship with them, but objectively especially if they're like a publicly traded company, it is their fiduciary duty to replace you. The only way to protect yourself from that is to have value that cannot be replaced that easily, that has nuance, that is institutionalized into the organization.
[00:47:20] Marcel Petitpas: And you do that by solving hard, complex, nuanced problems and having a genuine point of view, having a strategy, having a process, like developing all the expertise that Corey, your content and your experience is so well versed at helping people find those opportunities and develop that position. And so, I like to believe that we've done a good job of that at Parakeeto.
[00:47:40] Marcel Petitpas: It's certainly our mission and we continue to try and do that. And I can tell you that it has really helped us create the gross margin that I talked about today, the delivery margin. to build a business that we love and to make investments back into that. So it is a self fulfilling prophecy in many ways as well.
[00:47:57] Corey Quinn: Beautiful. Well, I'm going to wrap this up [00:48:00] here with just two more questions.
[00:48:02] Marcel Petitpas: Okay. First one is I'll try to keep my answers short. I know I'm not always good at that.
[00:48:06] Corey Quinn: Yeah, you know, there's no, there's no hard stop. What would be your party advice, particularly to an agency owner who is struggling with, maybe they've had their head in the sand, or they've You know dabbled with you know, youtube videos and whatnot and they just are not certain about You know, things like, you know, their, their delivery margin and the things that we've covered today.
[00:48:30] Corey Quinn: What, what advice would you have for them to, to move, to move forward in a productive way?
[00:48:36] Marcel Petitpas: Well, the first shamelessly is go download the free agency profitability toolkit at parakeeto. com forward slash toolkit. It costs nothing. There are hours of videos of me walking you through this and you can watch it on 0.
[00:48:49] Marcel Petitpas: 5x speed so that and you can watch it as many times as you want and there's spreadsheets that help you punch in the numbers and do all this math. So go do that. And then also if there's one [00:49:00] thing that you can walk away and do that, if all you did was this without even paying attention to it, a lot of these other problems would solve themselves.
[00:49:07] Marcel Petitpas: It's just make sure you understand what your delivery margin is when you price something. Just start there. Like indigestion. Is what most agencies are suffering from. It just happens to feel like starvation. And the way we fix that is we fix what we eat. So just start with the pricing. Make sure you know your delivery margin on the next thing that you sell.
[00:49:24] Marcel Petitpas: And if that's all you did, a lot of these things would probably fall into line fairly organically, or at least it would help you get to the place where you have more resources, get some help solving the rest of these problems.
[00:49:36] Corey Quinn: Beautiful. Last question is, what's your motivation?
[00:49:40] Marcel Petitpas: Damn, Corey, why'd you have to hit me with that one right at the end?
[00:49:43] Corey Quinn: Let's go.
[00:49:44] Marcel Petitpas: What is my motivation? If I'm being honest, my motivation when I became an entrepreneur was I wasn't trying to achieve something I was when I really reflect on, I was, I was running from something I was trying to prove [00:50:00] that I was worthy, that I was better than people, that I was competent and I decided to do this incredibly hard thing, which is building a business to try and prove that and the longer I am an entrepreneur, the more that chip on my shoulders becoming less of the reason that I do this.
[00:50:18] Marcel Petitpas: And that I'm still doing it. And now it's about really taking care of my family and creating a lifestyle where I get to spend the majority of my time pouring into other people and creating the kinds of opportunity that a couple of really important mentors created for me to go down this journey of personal development of, you know, Being, becoming successful, building wealth, building skills.
[00:50:43] Marcel Petitpas: So increasingly my motivation is, is that, but I'd be lying if I said that when I started, that's where it was coming from. It, a lot of it was insecurity and that insecurity is, is still there and it has utility. It's productive at times, but. It is also, uh, at times something I have to [00:51:00] learn how to tame so I can think clearly and make conscious decisions and relax and go and enjoy the things that I'm actually doing this for without feeling guilty or anxious about it.
[00:51:09] Corey Quinn: Well, from, from my perspective, uh, everything you're doing is adding a lot of value to a lot of people's lives. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I wanted to just ask one more question here. Where, where can people reach out to you to connect with you to download the materials you mentioned?
[00:51:25] Corey Quinn: What's a good place?
[00:51:26] Marcel Petitpas: Yeah. So find me on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to connect, answer questions in the DMs. I'm pretty active on there. Corey, you might find Corey and I chopping it up in the comments on a really nerdy post about agency profitability somewhere. So definitely get in my sphere there. If you want more free resources, parakeeto.
[00:51:43] Marcel Petitpas: com. We have tons of tools, calculators, blogs, podcasts, and of course the free toolkit. So make sure to check us out there. And if you're into podcasts, then check out the agency profit podcast. Corey has been a guest and we've got lots of other great content on there as well.
[00:51:59] Corey Quinn: Beautiful. [00:52:00] Marcel, thanks for coming on the show.
[00:52:02] Corey Quinn: Thank
[00:52:02] Marcel Petitpas: you for having me, Corey. I had a blast.
[00:52:03] Corey Quinn: That's it for today. I'm Corey Quinn, and I hope you join me again next time on the Deep Specialization podcast. If you received value from the show, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave us a review. Thanks, and we'll see you soon.
