Building an Agency Around Quality—for Clients and People, Powered by Productive

Muhlert Digital is a small digital marketing agency based in Berlin. I’m originally from Canada and spent time in the US doing the Silicon Valley thing before moving to Europe about 12 years ago. Before founding Muhlert Digital in 2022, I worked as an independent consultant for years and had experience both working at agencies and being part of agency growth from very early stages.

The reason I started the agency was simple: I’d seen too many agency models that didn’t work—for clients or for employees. Overloaded teams, junior handoffs that hurt quality, and people working unsustainable hours. We built Muhlert Digital around quality of service and quality of life. Our team is very senior, clients work directly with the people doing the work, and we’re intentional about not overloading anyone.

My role has evolved a lot. In the early days, I did almost everything—client work, strategy, and delivery. As we’ve grown to around 15 people and close to 40 clients, my focus has shifted more toward operations, sales, HR, team management, and overall business oversight. I’m still involved in strategy on key accounts, but my day-to-day is much more about running and scaling the agency.

It was pretty fragmented. We were using Google Sheets heavily, Harvest for time tracking and invoicing, ClickUp for project management, and then more spreadsheets for capacity planning and reporting. A lot of things were manual, stitched together, and honestly pretty rough.

I knew from past experience that this kind of setup doesn’t scale well. You can make it work when you’re small, but as the agency grows, the admin and operational complexity grow exponentially. We were managing with multiple tools, but there was no single source of truth, and getting a clear overview took way too much effort.

It wasn’t a crisis moment—it was more proactive than that. I’ve been part of agencies at different growth stages before, so I knew we’d eventually hit a wall if we didn’t put the right systems in place early.

Rather than waiting until projects were falling apart or profitability was unclear, I started looking for an integrated tool a couple of months before we truly needed it. I wanted something that could support where we were going, not just where we were at the time. That planning mindset was really the final push.

The biggest benefit was visibility. Once everything was set up properly, I could pull reports on profitability, hours per client, utilization per employee, or monthly workload in seconds.

That’s incredibly important to us because it ties directly to our values. We want to make sure clients are properly serviced and that no one on the team is quietly burning out. If someone is consistently working 60-hour weeks, Productive makes that visible, so we can step in and fix the situation.

It’s also made my job significantly easier as we’ve scaled. We’re running more complex projects now, including detailed financial tracking and managing multiple POs and client budgets. Productive gives us transparency and control that would be nearly impossible to manage manually at our current size.

We didn’t do paid onboarding, mostly because we assumed we’d figure it out ourselves. The Productive team was still very helpful and always available for follow-up questions, which made a big difference.

In hindsight, we probably should have invested in paid onboarding. We relied a bit too much on our SaaS experience and underestimated the importance of fully mapping out workflows, historical data imports, and month-end processes from the start. There was some trial and error, but once everything clicked, it’s been smooth and very effective.

Reporting, without a doubt. Being able to quickly pull accurate reports across projects, people, and finances is incredibly powerful.

Budget management is a close second—especially for more complex projects with multiple POs and financial moving parts. Those are the areas where Productive really shines and where it saves us the most time and mental energy.

Honestly, it would be a nightmare. We’d either have to find another tool with a very similar feature set—probably at a much higher cost—or build a custom solution ourselves.

At our current scale, doing what we do without Productive would mean a huge amount of manual work, spreadsheets, and duct-taped processes. It’s become an enabling force for the agency. I genuinely can’t imagine running the business the way we do now without it.