Tracking Time, Boosting Profit: Growth Bite’s Journey with Productive

We founded Growth Bite back in 2021 as a digital marketing agency built on a data-driven approach. Our goal has always been to help businesses of all sizes maximize their digital marketing ROI, and today we work with a wide range of clients, from startups to established enterprises across various industries. Whether they’re looking to strengthen their brand presence or achieve measurable growth, we support them through SEO, content marketing, and data-driven PR.

Our team includes our cofounder, SEO specialists, content strategists, copywriters, and other marketing experts. I serve as both CEO and key account manager, which means I’m deeply involved in both how the business runs and how we deliver results to clients.

Before we switched to Productive, we used Trello to manage our projects and client work. Trello worked well enough for basic task management, but as we grew, it became evident that it wasn’t built to handle the financial and operational complexity of running an agency. One of our biggest challenges was working with different freelancers across projects. Each freelancer has different rates, which means the cost of delivering work varies significantly from project to project. Trello gave us no way to track this. We couldn’t see the actual cost of delivering work for each client, which made it nearly impossible to understand our actual margins.

Another major issue was that we couldn’t easily determine how many hours each client had remaining on their contract. Pricing appropriately was extremely difficult because we had no clear visibility into the actual effort and costs involved in each project. Without this data, pricing decisions were based more on intuition than on strategy.

In short, Trello showed us tasks, but it didn’t show us the business behind them. We couldn’t connect the dots between hours worked, freelancer costs, remaining contract hours, and project profitability. Everything was siloed, and getting a full picture required manual work we simply didn’t have time for.

The main trigger that actually made us look for a new tool was the complete lack of visibility into time, both internally for our team and externally for client reporting. We couldn’t see how much time we were spending on different activities, and we couldn’t give clients clear updates on remaining hours or budget status. On top of that, we were building a new internal tool and allocating some of our expert hours toward its development. We needed much better tracking to understand how time-intensive this initiative was and how many resources we were dedicating to it.

When evaluating tools, we knew we needed something that could help us manage staff time effectively and, crucially, support different cost rates for each individual. Since we work with a mix of in-house team members and freelancers at varying rates, that feature was essential for accurate profitability tracking. A bonus that sealed the deal for us was Productive’s built-in vacation booking system. Having time-off management integrated directly into the same platform where we track projects and resources is incredibly convenient. It also ensures that our capacity planning is always accurate, one less tool, one less source of error.

As both CEO and key account manager, Productive has completely transformed how I work. I can now manage clients’ time much more effectively, generate reports without manually gathering data, and see precisely how long tasks actually take. That level of visibility means I can have informed conversations with clients about timelines and budgets and make strategic decisions about resource allocation with confidence.

One of the biggest improvements has come from Productive’s budgeting functionality. It has been an absolute game-changer for us. We can easily track contract changes and monitor profitability rates in real time, which has fundamentally changed how we make resourcing decisions. We’ve even discovered that for some clients, it’s more profitable to hire external freelancers, sometimes even less experienced ones, because their cost of work is lower. Before Productive, we would have defaulted to doing everything in-house without ever realizing the impact on margins. Now we can make far more data-driven decisions about when to use internal resources and when it makes more sense to bring in external talent.

The onboarding wasn’t the easiest thing we’ve ever done, but that’s okay; it was very worth it. We had to think through a few workarounds to fit Productive into our specific workflows. However, our account manager was extremely supportive and readily answered our questions, which made a big difference. 

We also came up with a clever internal solution: we fed the entire onboarding and documentation content into an AI assistant so we could ask custom questions and receive tailored answers quickly. This significantly accelerated the learning curve and helped the team become comfortable with the platform much faster.

My favorite features in Productive are the budgeting option and time tracking. These two capabilities work hand-in-hand to give us the financial visibility we were missing before. We can set budgets for each project, track time against them in real time, and immediately see when we’re approaching limits or when a project is more profitable than expected. This combination has become the foundation of how we run the agency.

Honestly, without Productive, we would have to build some kind of Excel formula extravaganza just to attempt to replicate what we have now. I’m afraid to even think about it. The amount of manual work, the room for error, and the lack of real-time visibility would be a nightmare. Productive has become so embedded in how we operate that going back isn’t really an option.