They expected to catch slackers...

When we started working with LDX Digital (a Google Ads agency), one of the first things I recommended was installing time-tracking software. And the reaction was what you'd expect - some hesitation from the team, some concerns about being watched, the usual friction that comes when you introduce any kind of measurement into a creative environment.

The founders pushed through it anyway. They trusted the process.

And then the data started coming in.

They had braced themselves for what most agency owners expect to find - proof that people weren't putting in the hours. Evidence of slacking. The uncomfortable realization that you're paying for 40 hours and getting 30.

What they found was the opposite.

Their team was working 11-hour days. Sometimes more. Consistently. Across the board.

These weren't people taking advantage or coasting. These were talented, committed professionals who cared deeply about their work - and they were drowning. Without anyone knowing, because there had never been a way to see it.

The COO described it to me later: "Turns out a lot of people - when they install time-tracking, they expect their team is going to be underworking. Our case was opposite. Everybody was overworked. Working 11 hours and more. So we realized these guys have too many accounts on them. That's why a lot of the accounts don't get enough attention. Things get missed. People just get burnt out."

The team was stretched so thin that they couldn't give each client the attention the work required. Small things were slipping through the cracks. Communication was slower than it should have been. The quality that had been there when the agency was smaller - when everyone had fewer accounts - was eroding. Because there literally weren't enough hours in the day.

And then, inevitably, clients started leaving.

Before they had the data, they thought they had a churn problem. Clients were leaving at an alarming rate - 37% monthly churn, which is catastrophic. And the natural assumption was that it was a delivery problem. A quality problem. Maybe even a sales problem - were they bringing in the wrong clients?

They tried different solutions. Courses. Consultants. New approaches to client communication. But nothing stuck, because they were treating symptoms without understanding the disease.

The disease was capacity. The team was so overloaded that they couldn't deliver the experience that makes clients want to stay.

But it looked like a performance problem. It felt like a performance problem. Every indicator suggested that the team was underperforming - except they weren't. They were over-performing, giving everything they had, and it still wasn't enough because there was simply too much work for too few people.

Without time-tracking, this would have stayed invisible forever. They would have kept pushing the team harder, wondering why results weren't improving, maybe even letting people go for "underperformance" when the reality was those people were working harder than anyone knew.

Once they could see the specific hours going into each account, they could right-size the workloads. They redistributed accounts. They made sure everyone was working sustainable hours. They created breathing room.

And the effects rippled outward immediately.

Team morale went up because people could invest in their accounts and see them succeed - instead of constantly triaging, constantly behind, constantly feeling like they were failing no matter how hard they worked.

Client satisfaction improved because each account was getting proper attention. The small things that had been slipping started getting caught. Communication became proactive again instead of reactive.

And churn dropped from 37% monthly to zero. For three consecutive months. Zero.

I think about time-tracking the way a manufacturer thinks about counting inventory.

No serious manufacturing operation would run without knowing exactly how much raw material they have in the yard. How much steel. How much lumber. How much of each component they need for production. That's foundational. Without it, you can't plan, you can't forecast, you can't make rational decisions about purchasing or production schedules.

But most agencies run without any real visibility into where their hours go.

Hours are the raw material of an agency. They're what you sell. They're what you use to produce value for clients. And yet most agency owners have only the vaguest sense of how those hours are being spent.

They know what they scoped. They know what they're billing. But the actual time - the real hours that real people spent on real work - is a mystery. It lives in people's heads, in vague recollections, in estimates that are wrong more often than they're right.

Which means every decision about capacity is a guess. Every decision about pricing is a guess. Every decision about hiring is a guess.

"The team feels busy" isn't data. "We're slammed" isn't data. "I think we need more people" isn't data.

And when you're making major business decisions based on feelings instead of facts, you're going to make expensive mistakes. You'll hire when you don't need to. You'll miss the signs that someone is burning out. You'll lose clients and never understand why. You'll leave money on the table because you don't know which projects are profitable and which ones are bleeding you dry.

Now, the resistance to time-tracking usually comes from a good place.

Agency owners worry about morale. They worry about creating a surveillance culture. They worry that tracking hours will make people feel like they're not trusted, like they're being watched, like their value is being reduced to a number on a spreadsheet.

I understand those concerns. And I've seen time-tracking implemented badly - used as a punishment tool, as a way to catch people doing wrong, as evidence in disciplinary conversations.

But that's not what time-tracking is for. That's a misuse of the tool.

Time-tracking, done right, is about visibility. You’re understanding what's happening so you can make better decisions. And often, those decisions benefit the team more than anyone.

At LDX, the data didn't lead to people getting fired. It led to people getting relief. It led to workloads being redistributed. It led to a more sustainable, more humane working environment.

The team went from feeling like they were constantly failing - no matter how hard they worked, it was never enough - to feeling like they could succeed. Like they had the time and space to do good work.

You can't fix what you can't see.

And right now, if you're running an agency without real visibility into where your hours are going, you're operating blind. You're making decisions based on gut feel and secondhand reports and the general sense that things are either fine or not fine.

That might work when you're small. When you can see everything yourself. When you're close enough to the work that you know intuitively where the time is going.

But it doesn't scale. And the bigger you get, the more expensive the blindness becomes.

If you're running without visibility, I’d like you to reply with "TIME". We’ll talk about how we might fix this for your agency.

Nick

P.S.

I put out a new video breaking down the leadership ladder I use to turn average hires into high performing operators, remove growth bottlenecks, and scale from $100K per month to $1M per month.

If you want to build a team that runs your agency, improve leadership, and scale to 7 or 8 figures, this video lays out the exact framework 👇