Scaling Success: Refyne’s Journey with Productive
Refyne is a digital marketing agency based in Denmark with a focus on performance marketing disciplines like SEO, SEM and paid social, and Data Analytics. Refyne wanted to be completely transparent with their operations, but also change the way projects are billed. So they decided to bill clients based on their satisfaction—a pretty unique way of doing things.
We spoke with Jens Lystlund Madsen, Refyne’s Managing Partner to learn how this agency continues to scale using Productive.
Can you tell us a bit about your role at Refyne and the search that led you to Productive?
When we launched the agency in 2020, we knew we wanted to have some kind of infrastructure in place, so we decided to go with Forecast. It wasn’t the most expensive project management tool out there, but we had heard good things about it, so we opted to try it out. It worked pretty well when there were just four of us, but once the specialists started coming in, we soon started to realize that the project management feature was overly complicated for our needs.
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We wanted to have a tool that would scale alongside us and we just didn’t see that happening with Forecast. One of our colleagues used to work with Productive so we decided to give it a go—and here we are.Â
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We wanted to have a tool that would scale alongside us and we just didn’t see that happening with Forecast. One of our colleagues used to work with Productive so we decided to give it a go—and here we are.Â
Was the learning curve steep? Would you say Productive is a scalable solution?
Initially, as with everything else, you need to spend some time getting the hang of how things work, but we got great support from the team on making sure that we got onboarded the right way.
There were a lot of times where you guys also just reached out to us to see if we needed anything. It makes you want to use the tool more, once you have the basics in place. I think we got a good introduction to that, so adoption wasn’t a problem at all for us internally.Â
The pains that we were experiencing were that we just wanted to have something that could accommodate a lot of things, and I think Productive solved that issue really well for us. I don’t see why we wouldn’t be using Productive when we are 50 people or 100, you know? I feel like we can grow with this solution, which is good.
Did you track financials before Productive? How did things change once you made the switch?
We wanted to, but with Forecast it seemed like we skipped a chunk of onboarding and we never really got the hang of it. It seemed like we’d have to pay quite the sum if we wanted to use some of the financial features and at that point we were already unsure whether we wanted to to keep using Forecast. So, no, we didn’t really have a profitability overview before we switched to Productive.Â
Our setup is a bit different since we don’t have retainers. We only bill the actual work we’ve done, and being able to see that we deliver projects on budget is of essence. We also differentiate billable hours through seniority and there isn’t a lot of tools that can make that work, but we managed to do it with Productive.Â
I can check our budgets in just a few clicks now and we’re not in a situation where we’re at the end of the month and we still have to deliver 40% of the budget and overwork ourselves relentlessly.Â
What benefits would you say working in Productive brought to Refyne?
I’d say we saved a lot of time. I can check our budgets in just a few clicks now and we’re not in a situation where we’re at the end of the month and we still have to deliver 40% of the budget and overwork ourselves relentlessly.Â
This saves time for our specialists and for me, as well, since I don’t have to keep digging for data anymore. Information is easily accessible and we can check it continuously to make sure we’re on track with project budgets.Â
How would you feel without Productive?
I honestly don’t even know where we’d start if you guys suddenly disappeared. I think that Productive as a whole strikes a good balance between product management, profitability, views, having accessibility in terms of reports at fair price for most agencies.
I’m 100% sure that our cost on tools like these would go up if Productive wasn’t there, because I don’t think we would be able find something that ties so well into our business.Â
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Switch from multiple tools and spreadsheets to one scalable agency management system.
