Production and Profit Management with Timmy

Transcript

Speaker: You're listening to Crossing the Axis, the podcast that explores the commercial side of film production with your host, James Keblis.

Speaker: Welcome listeners and thank you for tuning in into the show. If you run a production company, you know there are really three parts to running the business. There's marketing where you put your point of view out into the world.

Speaker: There's sales where you turn that point of view into helping clients succeed. And then there's delivery where you do the work that lives up to the promise that you made. Each one of these requires a different set of skills, a different mindset, and usually a completely different set of tools.

Speaker: But the real challenge is not getting each part right. It's getting them all to work together in a way that actually produces a healthy, profitable business. And that's where things tend to break down.

Speaker: Most companies are pretty good at winning the work. Many are great at delivering on the creative, but very few have real visibility into whether they're actually making money on the work that they've won.

Speaker: Margins often get lost in the handoff between sales and delivery or somewhere inside the complexity of the job itself. So today's conversation is all about that third part of the system, the delivery, and more specifically, how production companies can better understand, protect, and improve their profit margins.

Speaker: And to guide us in this conversation is my guest, PJ Cole, CEO and co-founder of Timmy, a production and profit management platform built for commercial production companies.

Speaker: PJ comes out of the production world as an executive producer, where he saw firsthand how difficult it is to track budgets, manage resources, and make decisions with financial clarity. And Timmy was basically born out of that experience.

Speaker: And I've had a chance to see Timmy firsthand with my own clients. And what impressed me most was not just the delivery side of it, but how it changed the way producers and business teams thought about money altogether.

Speaker: Now, when I do a Timmy integration directly into the copper CRM systems that I build, I see the benefits of how it offers biz dev teams visibility into delivery, while delivery teams benefit from seeing the business context surrounding the work coming in.

Speaker: And that's why I wanted to have this conversation, because I don't see Timmy as just another project management or staffing tool. Rather, I see it actually becoming part of a larger operating system where marketing, sales, and delivery are all connected and looking at the business through the same lens of profitability and operational clarity.

Speaker: And that's what I'm hoping we're going to get into here today. So PJ, if you're up for the challenge, then welcome to the show. Great. Thanks, James. Thanks for having me. Yeah. And if you weren't up for the challenge, I'm not sure what we would be doing. Maybe no one's here in this episode at all. We'll see. Yeah.

Speaker: So did I set this up right? Did i characterize to me the way you would characterize it? Yeah. No, I think it was excellent. Yeah. I think, you know, you know we Right, right.

Speaker: before we get into all of that let's establish some credibility with you who the hell are you and what business do you have telling us what to do right Yeah, I mean, you know, yeah it's a good question. I mean, I think i'm I'm the same as any other producer that was out there kind of doing this job. And and and ultimately, you know, there's nobody better to kind of be thrown into the deep end of the pool to kind of figure out like you're you're given a budget for whatever, half a million dollars, couple million dollars. And then you have to figure out how am I going to spend that? And how do I do that in a responsible way? and also deliver something at a very high quality. The standards are high, especially when you work at some different places. So for a long time, i was at Radium, which was a VFX company in San Francisco, and running some very high-end visual effects kinds of projects. And then from there, I wound up at Gooby Silverstein & Partners, where I ran their in-house production department there for 10 years. And that started out with... maybe 20 people and scaled up to 120 something people. So I think in doing something like that, you know, and trying to manage nine edit suites and 30 animation stations and 15 producers and 20, 20 other kind of characters running around with your credit card, you, you kind of have to figure out some systems and processes. So like I said, I think, you know, there's nobody better than producers to kind of figure out some sort of process in order to kind of manage a project. Yeah.

Speaker: And ultimately what you wind up doing is cobbling a bunch of different solutions together. you know In the Goobie standpoint, you know there was it was from a marketing standpoint, it was very easy. I was in the building, so the work just kind of came to me, which was kind of nice. But from ah from a production, from a deliverable standpoint, getting things through the process and and making sure that something makes money took a lot of of hurdles and hoops and and things to jump through in order to get yourself there.

Speaker: And then to report you know where you were back to the powers that be. so I don't know how many spots I've done. I don't know, you know, the total budgets that I've spent, but it's a lot. and And so, you know, some have gone well, some I've driven directly into the wall. um And, you know, you kind of learn from all of them. And they're they're all bespoke. right like Every production has its own set of problems, but there was no real tools that are built for it. So it's an interesting problem to kind of live in. And it's another thing to build something around it that kind of services that. And everybody does it kind of somewhat of different way. you know i wouldn't say that we have standardized it necessarily. I think you know with Timmy, we ah have built something that has a lot of flexibility to it, a lot of configuration, a lot of ways that it can be set up. a lot of different ways in which you can kind of roll through the system. So it's it's kind of up to the client, the company, the agency, the the production company to decide, you know, what are their processes and how are are those things going to work? And then we we designed Timmy around that, really.

Speaker: so it was the origin story then is out of the bigger shops that you worked at, seeing what was working, what not working, and then moving on with your own ideas. Like, hey, let's there's you saw big a bigger problem and decided to address it?

Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I definitely saw the problem, you know, and then i you know, I left Gubbie Silver Stadium Partners and started my own production, you know, studio called Where the Buffalo Roam. And, you know, we started out like everybody else using 10,000 feet or what is now something else and spreadsheets and Google Sheets and, you know.

Speaker: limped along that way and that was great. i mean and And I think it's great for a while until you start to get to a certain amount of scale and money um and then you really start to have to dig in to kind of figure out how to to really do something in in order to to operate. so you know And then I guess to go to the way but way back machine, I was part of.com 1.0. I landed in San Francisco in 1994 and ran through three different startups and two of those were software companies where I was a product manager writing specifications for software. So i had kind of gleaned a lot of information around software development, had built software before. So you know it it was it was an easy thing for me to kind of take the things that I had learned from the production world and and kind of apply them based on my experience of of how projects should be produced and to find out what those workflows

Speaker: are and and implement those workflows. And then ultimately, you know our ability to take Timmy and grow it inside of WCBR allowed us to kind of battle test exactly what it was that we were building and see what worked and what didn't. you know And there were definitely some cul-de-sacs that we ran down where we things were a little too tight in some places and they were a little too loose in other places. So we we were able to kind of refine Timmy in a real-world scenario. It was pretty pretty rad ah You were foolish enough to pursue this thing. That's right. That's true. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right. I mean, that's my partner, Tim, and I say that a lot. We're like, we're just dumb enough to think we could pull it off.

Speaker: Yeah, that's exactly right. Fun fact, the podcast that we're on here right now, Crossing the Axis, was born actually by my predecessor, Max, who started it as a marketing system for this very exact thing.

Speaker: he it was called pipeline you know like many people have tried this and um and most people don't succeed and yeah get to as far as you have with uh with timmy and i so i just commend you for that that's it's a but the the very first to episode where i hand off from max to me as the host of this podcast is a breakdown of what happened with his startup adventure and how hard it was and what he learned from it and things like that. And if anyone's curious about that story, then they should go back and listen the episode. And I'm sure you could relate to a lot of that and how sure hard it is.

Speaker: it's It's brutal. I mean, having... built a couple different systems in the past and those are not around any longer. And and to to get to where we are, we're excited about, you know, there's a long kind of roadmap ahead of us and and lots of things that we still want to do. And we run into people all the time that are like, well, we were going to build this ourselves. And I was like, great, good luck, you know, call me. Let me know how it's going. It's like anything. It's persistence. it's not it's just You just have to get up and do it every day.

Speaker: And it's it's not it's a roller coaster ride. Some days you're like, this is the best. Other days you're like, this is absolutely the most brutal thing I've ever done. Well, you know, i my business is I, you know, create these systems for production companies and it's largely built on marketing and sales, but I am committed to the integrating delivery into that. I think it's critical. In fact, I think it all starts from delivery. And usually what I end up doing with clients is integrating some sort of tool like a Monday or 10,000 feet or asana or something like that and i'm always disappointed in its ability to integrate and then i i came across a client a couple years ago and uh they told me about this tool that they have called you know timmy and i was like oh what's that and like you i've always wanted to do a really robust integration with the systems that i build and that's when i met you and timmy and i saw it firsthand for this outfit in new york and i just was like oh my goodness, this is really impressive. It was further along than anything I had seen before. it was kind of introduced to me anyway up you know as a production management and operations management, scheduling, and all that kind of stuff thing. But that undersold it from what i learned more of. I was like, oh, this is a money tool. This isn't a scheduling tool. And so I keep saying that. Is that how you see it? What are the one, two big things

Speaker: problems that you're trying to hit with Timmy and how it sets it apart from anyone else trying to do this? Yeah. I mean, I think the the biggest thing is basically having everything all in one place. The way the systems exist now, everything's a disparate island in which they sit on. So having had to play the role of all the various characters along the way, having to do the marketing and sales part, as well as the producing side, as well as the artist side, I kind of understand the entire pipeline. And so the the tricky part of it is, even if we just take the first part of it, to your point, of the the sales part, and then the the deliverables or the production side of things, is like, great, ah I'm in my CRM, and I'm in my information about this particular opportunity, and I have it all in there, and that's great. And then they're like, great, we want you to bid on this project. I'm like, okay, awesome. Now I'm going to go over to my project management system, and I'm going to go enter that same information over here, And ultimately what happens is, one, I skip the first step and I go right to the production side of things. And now I don't have data in there. Or I enter it twice and then the information inside of the production platform is updated. And now my CRM is out of out of sync with what is happening here. So just chase that all the way down the pipeline. And now you've got data that nobody knows what's going on. Everybody has a different...

Speaker: perspective as to what's happening with a particular production. So I think the big issue from just that part of it, just everybody having the right POV or the correct POV of what's happening in a production is all the same. Everybody's seeing the same information. It's very, very straightforward from that standpoint.

Speaker: you know The other part of that is the margin management and becoming a profitable company, understanding what is it going to take me to do this project? And then how much am I able to get from the client in order to do that? And then what's what's the variance between those two things? And is that enough to cover...

Speaker: my overhead? Is that enough for me to make a little bit of money so that I can continue to be here tomorrow? And I mean, I think for the most part, the the commercial world seems to operate in a place where it seems as if production companies are really gouging them. And and i I would say 99% time, the people out there just trying to make their margins so they can be here tomorrow. And that's that's the goal. And to keep everybody that is with them working and hired and having the opportunities that they can to further their career, their art, whatever it is. So it's it's really those two things. It's really managing the health of a project and really having insights into that project from whichever angle you're coming from, whether you're management and you want to kind of understand what's happening across all the projects, or if you're a producer and you just need to understand your few projects that you have going, or if you're in finance, you know, you know, how much revenue is coming in how much cost is going out. There's a lot of, a lot of different views into the system and a lot of different interests when they do that. So it's, it's, that's really the crux of things. Can you get into the specifics of where you see profit and margin management being done incorrectly and how maybe you built Timmy to help with that?

Speaker: Yeah, I mean, where it gets done incorrectly is, you know, I think without certain systems in place, it it can sometimes be a bit of a guessing game. You're just kind of like, all right, well, i we love this project. we We love the idea of it. I think it's going to further us as a company. We think it will we're the perfect company to do this project. You know, do I really have insights into understanding what my margin is on this and will I make money on it? Some of the you know better companies out there are better at at doing it. and And some of the smaller companies are really just kind of, it's sometimes a bit of a guessing game. And you know some companies are just running as hard as they can. like you know it' You're just bailing out the boat as fast as you can. And it just continues to kind of fill up with water. you know It's like anything, it's like if the music stops, you're like you could be in real big trouble very, very, very quickly. And you you see a lot of companies that have gone through those things, you know huge companies that have gone through those things where... They really didn't quite have an understanding of, you know, if you rolled it all up, are we in good shape? If the music stopped tomorrow, how much money is in the bank? How much runway do I have? Where am i

Speaker: it's It's everything. It's the lifeblood. I mean, if I'm a production company, cash flow is the most important thing to me. And if I have, you know, three huge projects that land all at the same time, It's like, can I float $6 million? dollars you know And how long can I float $6 million dollars and make sure that everybody gets paid? It's it's ah it's a precarious place to kind of live. you know i think you you need to have insight into how things are going at the moment, where you are for the year, and then what's coming down the road. and and from a production standpoint, from even an agency standpoint at this point, everything's project-based. you know the The most view you have is like 14 weeks out, maybe 18 weeks out. like how How far out can I really see where I am and what does that look like and how are we scaling? and you know The last six years have been pretty volatile. You really kind of have to have your hands on the steering wheel a little bit. In order to control those things, you really have to have an understanding about what's going on.

Speaker: And so how have you created Timmy to address that? we we haven't We haven't changed the way that people work. I mean, I think what we've taken and applied the processes and procedures that we've all been doing for whatever now, 100 years. I mean, we didn't always have Google Sheets, but always kind of use whatever tools were available to us. And so we haven't necessarily changed that part of it. You know, we we see that as as kind of the the framework for what it is that we do. What we've attempted to do is to be able to consolidate the information to a place where everybody is looking at the same thing and it doesn't live on an island by itself.

Speaker: And along the way, if we can programmatically take some of the things out of the process, production is death by a thousand cuts. Where do we create room in order to be creative and to come up with the answers or to come up with the great solutions and and figure out how you solve a production problem? And there always are production problems. and you know whether it's time, which is always the case, and or budget versus what the ask is, is always an interesting thing. And and sometimes you've got to get pretty creative about that. And in order to do that, you have to have more time. And if we can take little bits and pieces of it out, then then we do. so You know, it's it's in little places, right? Like I create a calendar of tasks inside of Timmy and that starts to create my projections within ultimately informs my estimate, which then it and it also is informing the resources which I'm using over that period of time. And it also gives me insight into the utilization. So it's like in one screen, I'm affecting 15 other places. Yeah.

Speaker: Dive into that some more for me, because I think that's the interesting part that we talked about is shared visibility. So everyone's looking at the same thing. That's a big deal just in of itself. But that's often solved by a lot of different tools and things out there. If you're using spreadsheets, then shame on you should definitely not be using that. But I think that the way that you have built it all together to do one action, then to have a sequence of actions follow that end up in a number.

Speaker: that tells you something is the part that I think is really interesting. Yeah. I mean, it's really just the start of it and in kind of the creation of that project and, and all kinds of things happen at that point, right? Like we've, we have integrations with copper. um I know we've talked about that in the past, which is the handoff from sales to, to the production team is literally like going from intox to bidding. As soon as I move it into bidding and copper, it creates the project and all the information associated with that project inside of Timmy. So I've now,

Speaker: cut out that part where I was like, I enter it here and I come over here and I enter it here, as well as you know the information that I now have is the same as what was in copper. So there's that side of it. Also, when the project's created, we create all the folder structures associated with that particular project. So what happens today without Timmy is I have a folder, I go make a duplicate of it, and and then I paste it into place and I put a job number on it and I do whatever else I have to do. So we we automate that part.

Speaker: It creates a Slack channel or a Google chat channel for me automatically. It creates the the frame IO project. And so I can manage that. So it's it's those types of things that kind of happen automatically. that are literally like can distract you from a day, you know, or the flow of getting something done. Right.

Speaker: And then again, like it's like once I'm in the project, there's a ton of flexibility within Timmy in order to like run a project. I mean, we have, I think know it was it last year, the year before, I mean, we had over 300 million in approved estimates that ran through Timmy, which was pretty cool. And then depending on how you want to set up a project and like I said, there's a ton of flexibility there. There's the idea of a project and then sub projects that are underneath that. So Depending on the complexity of whatever the production is and how you how granular you want to be about it, you can do it. you know I've seen certain clients that will set up agency-based services and be like, hey, this is the strategy subproject. This is two weeks. These are the people that are going be on it, and this is going to be the cost associated with this project.

Speaker: effort around strategy. And then another section that is copywriting and art direction and and scripting the project. And that again is a separate sub project. And then ultimately, then you can have the production as a separate project and the post production as another project. The interesting part there is it all rolls up underneath the main project And gives you a sense of your overall margin, which is great because, you know, things also have different margins, right? My my live action production is based on a production fee of 20%.

Speaker: My agency-based fees can be around 50% or more. depends, you know? i mean, it could be Silver Shade Partners. We charged, I probably can't say, a lot. Yeah. The money is in creative and strategy. Yeah, it is. It is. And they got a lot in fees, which is great. And so that's its own margin. And then post-production, i I tend to see most people, and we suggest it, you run at a 50% gross margin. 30% of that's going to be set ah aside for overhead. And then you got a 20% profit margin that you're you're kind of rolling with. so that those are kind of some of the, I think, kind of benchmark-y kind of things. And then again, you can kind of roll it up and and look at kind of the overall health of it. a particular project and really have a really good sense about where you're at with regards to that. And theoretically, as you build it and I project out what all the costs are that are associated with it, and then I send it into an estimate, I already have a sense about what my margin is, right? Like against the budget that they've given me. So- Then the question is, is this worth it? Should I do this project? And what is that all what does that all mean?

Speaker: And then I think you're you're you're in an informed place. you know You really have a sense about, yeah, we're going to take this one on because we like the creative. Or our goal from a sales standpoint, right like we need to hit a million dollars this month. And what does that look like? Where are we for the month? you know Should we take this one on? i i always say to Jen that advertising and and commercial production a river of nickels. It's not it's not like that there's a ton of money in there. You're just trying to stack up a few of these things to make make the money that you want. So sometimes you've you've got to stack up a bunch of little jobs to get yourself to to where it is that you want to be.

Speaker: you know I've seen WTBR. I mean, at one point, I think we did like 400 jobs in a year. it was like It was a lot of little jobs, but we were able to to have it make money and we were able to kind of grow the company and you know really have a sense about what what that meant to us and and how we would do that. As we kind of grew from this little bitty production company and to the medium talents that we are, we were able to get bigger jobs and less and kind of have a sense about how we would operate that way. So you know beyond, i guess, what you're doing kind of in real time is also the ability to kind of look back and see what it was that you did over the years. How did that all go? be able to roll those up, run whatever reports you want to run, and really kind of understand

Speaker: how you're operating as a company. Am I charging enough for this thing? Or or am i am I bidding out enough hours for this particular role? am i you know What's really kind of happening with you as a company besides just at a project level? So you can go from 10 feet to 100,000 feet and and really kind of have some insights along the way.

Speaker: That's great. You know, a position that I prescribe is to not bid on jobs based on time and materials, to really base it on value, base it on like what you think, you you know, it's worth to them. What kind of sales are they going to have? And you should be getting a piece of that proportionally. But at the end of the day, we still have to know how much is it going to cost for you know me to make the, i' like, the what what am I gonna pay for? How have you seen Timmy used in terms of that bidding process before the pro, like to really make smarter bids, to make up maybe a case to get a client to pay what you're asking for or anything like that? do you have any stories that you could share on that?

Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on the client. I mean, we come from that side of things where it's just like, it's full transparency. Hopefully my value is in my rate. That's where I'm trying to create real value. know a lot of people try to operate from like, I just tell you it's $50,000 or it's $100,000 and I don't give you any backup to that. And there's some companies that operate that way and work that way and clients that are willing to operate that way. I've never worked with them. worked with any those clients. They've all been like, these are our rates, or these are your approved rates, and this is how you operate. I think it's a bit of science and voodoo, right? The science of it is really telling, through the estimate, the story of how you're going to get this thing done. And what does that look like? The voodoo part of it a little bit is like, where can I tuck in a cost here and there, or a part of the bid that I'm going to be able to catch up with myself on? Because you have lost leaders in there, right? you know, you've got cost consultants that are going to beat you up on the cost of a PA or, and not to pick on procurement or cost consultants. It's okay to pick up procurement anytime. Yeah, it's okay. Okay, okay. I do, I do. I'm really rough on them. You know, there are certain things that have kind of gone away too. Like we're, you know, the amount of in-person sessions is kind of, Post-COVID is just starting to come back, which is great.

Speaker: you know But at that time, I could i could use a room rate and I could charge $1,000 a day for that room. I could catch up with myself on my assistant editor cost that they were only allowing me to charge $75 an hour on or whatever it was. And you know that wasn't even near their salary.

Speaker: So, you know, there were other ways in which we can kind of catch up with ourselves, whether it's on deliverables or archiving or any kind of ancillary fees in which I can kind of somewhat get myself into a place where I have ah a kind of margin that allows us, like i said, ah to be here tomorrow.

Speaker: And how many companies do you have using Timmy now? We have 30 companies using Timmy. Yeah. They've all been amazing clients and partners in this. You know, they they have a lot of feedback and ideas and things like that, that we've poured back into the system as well, which is is kind of a beautiful thing in the sense that we... We don't just have the knowledge of the Timmy team that's being poured in here. You've got 30 different clients with hundreds of years of experience in production, really having an opinion about what they need. And we've been able to kind of turn around and build those things for them. So it's been exciting.

Speaker: Well, like I said in the opening, I saw that firsthand. entered a scene with a client that you already had that became my client too. And I thought, oh man, let's build something fun here. And you all just rolled up your sleeves and said, look yeah, pitter patter, let's get at her. I mean, you guys were in, it was like, and we built something pretty extraordinary that it's now a native integration in the copper marketplace. So you don't even need a third party integrator or anything like that. It's just, you know, yeah connect straight across. And that was so cool to see you all just, you know, lean into a challenge and just write and meet it so well. It was very fun.

Speaker: One, would say we we love Copper. We love the product team over there. And we also use the product. They use it at Where the Buffalo Roam and and we use it at Timmy as well. So we we really are big fans of Copper and feel really lucky to be kind of partnered so closely with them. And then I'll just add to like, I appreciate what you're saying about seeing it firsthand. I mean, I think on the other side of that, before we built Timmy, we always felt like, oh, the promise of of a Timmy product was the thing that we were always looking for. Right. And I would always send Luke, who's our head of customer success, would be like, hey, man, let's go take a look at you know this thing that's called 10,000 feet. I think it's got everything that we need. let's Let's dig into that and see if it's got all the bits and pieces that we want.

Speaker: And we'd find it, we'd read about it and we're like, it's got budgeting. This is great. We we we were were like halfway there and we dig into it. And it's not really, it's a field. I could just put the budget in there, but it it was really about resourcing and and collecting time. So it it didn't really tie to anything. And it you know, we had looked at what was it called? Snapdragon and...

Speaker: CETA and actualize it and and a bunch of or a farmer's wife. I use farmer's wife at at Radium and again, another great scheduling piece of software, but really didn't have all the bits and pieces that we really wanted to have in there. And so i get why people will walk into something like a Timmy demo and be a bit like, okay, go ahead, show me what you guys did and and feel a little bit like they're going to be disappointed in the You've been there. I've been there. I've done it over and over again. And so, you know, for us, it just finally became one of those things where i guess we were the people that were the ones who were supposed to do it. We're supposed to build, build this, you know, yeah we try to, we, we try to delineate, we try to stop ourselves. Like, ah you know, do I have kind of a CRM light function within Timmy? Yeah. A little bit, but I'm, I'm not copper. i'm not, Salesforce. I'm not these other things. um you know So it's like, okay, great. Let's integrate with you know somebody like Copper and kind of work our way through that. Or you know am i am I close enough to payroll?

Speaker: Could I run payroll? I'm collecting time. I don't see why not. But we're like, great. Let's just draw the line there and we'll let somebody like Ratbook or Rippling or whoever kind of handle the payroll side of things. So it's you know we've really been focused on this part of what we've built so far there's a lot of other things that we want to do still there there's yeah it's exciting one of the values that i see in the integration of a crm whether no matter what it is is you get um i think most production company owners really want their producers to act more like account managers than they do yeah and into and to really bring in more money and not just think of one-off projects but to really dive in and listen in to the client think about needs and thinking about the next project and and thinking about goals that you might have here on so all of those types of things and what an integrated system does

Speaker: is it gets the producers, the delivery team to start seeing projects coming in from their inception when you're just reaching out and trying to get a conversation to having a conversation, understanding their goals and needs and then building a value proposition that addresses those and then having that turn into a job and then winning the job and then go. And when those systems are talking to each other,

Speaker: the delivery team becomes more engaged in that and then they become more connected to the client because they saw it from the very beginning and they're thinking like account managers i've seen it with my own eyes and it's it's a really i think it hits a note that most production company owners want and this does that i i just i can't i can't overstate how important it is to have delivery and your sales crm all connected together Yeah, I think it's absolutely clutch. What you're talking about is also kind of, i think, where the world is evolving. i think with, ah you know, production studios that are out there that are like, really are those truly like soup to nuts kind of companies. You have to evolve your producers into account managers. This isn't like a, you know... great, we delivered. Good luck. You know, we'll see you when you come back. Hopefully you liked it as opposed to really kind of understanding the client, understanding the relationship, understand where they're going, what they're looking to achieve. I think that is where the world is going and it is, that is exactly what's happening in the, I think those people are being grown and have and are you know fully realized characters that are that are operating out there in the world right now, which is great. And I mean, you know if you're a small, medium-sized production company, you probably are doing all those things anyway. You you have to wear all those hats. just that's how it That's how it works.

Speaker: Yeah, and there there's the flip side of that too, where um not only is it good for the delivery team to see what's happening early and to get that sense of ownership, but the business development team, whether marketing or sales or whatever, the the ones trying to bring in clients – They can see what's going on in the delivery because they have a sense of ownership. They made a promise. They want to make sure you live up to the promise, right? And they can check in with clients and do their sales work.

Speaker: And so like they don't even have to go to the tool. They can just see the stage where it's at, what's going on, some dashboard level um important numbers. that are that only matter for what conversation you might have. So you might even act like an account manager yourself and never have to go into production. do You never have to bother you know the executive producer. You have to ask questions and and and get in their way. You can get all the information you need right there just from the dashboard. That's amazing too. we Yeah, we built that directly into Copper, which is great. So there is there is basically a status report.

Speaker: um And within that status report is the same status report that's sitting inside of Timmy. in relative real time, you're looking at exactly where that project is what the budget was, what the final budget was, whatever the approved budget was, as well as your actuals to date, your projected cost to complete, your working margin, your margin at award. You could see kind of everything from within copper natively. So you you don't have to leave there. It's all happening there. Having again played kind of both roles, And sometimes I will say as a producer, I'm a little bit nervous to share with the salespeople and the dev people the the making of the sausage because it gets it gets real mess it gets real messy in the middle of the production. And maybe I've got a couple overages that are out there, or I've got a plan for the projection side of things where I'm going to be able to get rid of a few other things that are in the bid. And I'm i'm going to pull this one out of the fire Or or I'm not.

Speaker: But you know it's it's a little bit spooky and in some of that transparency, but you know you don't want to freak them out too much. know Sometimes it's nice to have it and somewhat of a black box for for the sales team.

Speaker: Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. You can control what's on that and what's visible in that dashboard. That's right. That's right. like Don't freak out yet. It's all going to be fine. It's going to work out.

Speaker: We have a plan. So where do you see Timmy going? Like, you know, what big problems are you addressing now? and what are you looking at into the future? And yeah, tell me a little bit about what's on the scope.

Speaker: Yeah, I think some of the big parts are there's some AI stuff that's coming. There's some prototypes that we've built out that are pretty amazing. Even kind of a um regular chat prompt to basically describing exactly what the production is and have it build out essentially a project around that. We are really working on um some AI integration on the reporting side of things. I mean, we have a ton of structured data ah within the system and and kind of the question is,

Speaker: can I pull that data out? And then what can I do with it once I have it? And it's like, you could prompt it and ask it whatever question you want. You know, tell me how billable my editor's been over the past quarter, six months, a year. so there's some things that are exciting there. There's some canned reports that we're looking at. We're we're really, really working hard with a lot of the accounting departments at at some different studios. And, you know, revenue recognition is such an important thing. Like, when did I spend the money? When did I, when did I do the work? And that's when I can recognize the revenue. you know We're all skating on this razor thin edge of cash and and revenue and how I'm going to get tax. I don't want to recognize all this revenue all in one month.

Speaker: I've got no cost against it. And then suddenly now I've got this huge tax kind of component to it. So really working hard with those folks. There's some Gantt chart kind of functions within there that we've been looking at and and some other kind of views into the system. you know it's ah It's a lot of little things. There's integration that we're doing with ramp and bill.com and Expensify. So figuring out a process on that side of things, which is pretty exciting.

Speaker: And the ability to request like a ramp card within Timmy to then have a accounting approve it and then to get your ramp card or whatever within Timmy or your virtual card, if you will. And then the ability to kind of run your project that way. there's lots of There's lots of big pieces that are on the way that we're excited about.

Speaker: Yeah. And in in this business, it's so funny. I think that most people in this business know that they're doing things in an antiquated way, but they don't make the change. It's like the devil I know is the one I'll go with. And they're just, the change is too much work, too much effort, too much pain, not going to do it.

Speaker: How do you deal with that pain that they feel? Yeah. Right? Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting thing. I mean, you're right. It is that that devil that they know or they've they've developed this themselves. You're like, they're you're going to have to pry this from my cold, dead hand in order for me to to let go of this process or this procedure or or the way that I'm doing this. so And I will say, the for the people that have made it themselves, their own ah you know spreadsheets with their own pivot tables and all, and they're so proud of it and they think that everybody loves it. Nobody loves it. They're just too afraid to tell you. Yeah. You're the only one that loves it.

Speaker: Yeah, know those people that have built those things. and i And I can tell you, I can't remember what that stat was. I think it was like 94% of all sheets have some sort of error in them. right And so it's there's a real problem with that. And we even saw it at WTBR in the early days. It's like somebody came to me and they're like, hey, so we haven't been doing markup on this line item for the past year. Yeah. And, you know, sheets are a weird thing. You know, there's versions of them that are out there and people are duplicating those things and it just suddenly just becomes an absolute train wreck. So for us with those types of clients, it's it's an interesting thing. What we do find is that they'll come to us, we'll give them a demo and they'll be like, this is great. you know, heads start nodding right away. People are very excited. They get it. And then they get very busy and they go away and they get to experience all those problems all over again.

Speaker: And then they come back to us and they're like, okay, we're ready. Let's do this thing. So we we wind up, we call it a boomerang. It's a funny, it happens to us a lot. Like people come to kind of understand it, what we're doing and how it can help them and then continue down the road that they're on only to come back later, which is, we we love it. We're happy that they're back. We're happy that we get to help them. And we do, I think we we really do try to give them kind of like our best practices or what we've understood, ah you know, in the 30 clients that we do have or, you know, the hundreds of clients that we have talked to, and the hundreds of tech stacks that we've looked at, you know, to to really consult with them on what we think or what we've seen are the best practices for this and and how to best operate. Everybody's built a little different. Some people have a accounting in-house, some people have a third party accounting team. and And so what does that all mean from a

Speaker: AP, AR, invoicing side of things. you know and you know Some people have sales and biz dev, others don't. and What does that kind of look like and how can we help with that? i mean We sat with one client and really kind of mapped out the entirety of a production within that facility.

Speaker: and It's a pretty big place. I think they've got 80 people in this production company and five, 10 producers that are kind of running things depending on what they have in the building and mapped the whole thing out. and and We were there with like the CFO, the business affairs person, everybody that was kind of producers, executive producers, biz dev people, everybody was there kind of talking through it. And we kind of mapped it out with like, this is the process and this is how Timmy operates within that process.

Speaker: What we've done is this is now repeatable. You can now repeat this. You can do it exactly the same way. And and we've we've organized and configured Timmy in a way that makes that happen. So along the way, if you're moving from a bidding to ah awarded or whatever it is that you call it, there are certain checklists that you need to go through in order to make those things happen. So it's it's very much like we're also kind of helping to kind of make sure that everybody's adhering to whatever the processes are that that that company has come up with. So we do ah we do a ton of consulting, way more than we probably should.

Speaker: We should get paid a lot more money for what we do. Yeah, everybody gets to meet Luke, essentially. Everybody gets to talk to Luke. Everybody loves to talk to Luke. Luke loves to talk to them. The hard part for Luke is he also has to absorb their pain. And then he has to, I don't know what he does from there with it. He's got to go fishing for a week. So yeah, we we try to take care of Luke as best as we can because he he is he is out there on the front lines of this thing and and making some stuff happen, which is great.

Speaker: Well, PJ, thank you for jumping on the show and unpacking this. I have worked with a few different types of software companies like this and the tried to handle this. Timmy's the best one that I've seen so far. i just want you to know i appreciate how hard it is to do tech startup. actually did. i don't know if you're familiar with ShareGrid. i did ah I was one of the early people of ShareGrid, and we did that in the early days. And I saw the startup tech world and how hard that was. And I've seen many, many people go for it and and come up short. And it is hard. So my hats off to you, man, for keeping it going this long and staying strong and um making a really good product that i I see is actually helping people. I hope so. That's the goal for sure.

Speaker: Help myself. Ultimately, that was really that's really what i was. and I'm just now sharing it with everybody else. It's it's a good deal. Okay. And if people want to learn more about Timmy, what should they do? You'll just go to Timmy.io. There's a little way to sign up for a demo. Just plug your name in there and then Luke luke will call you. Luke will email you and then we'll get a demo going.

Speaker: All right. Well, thank you so much, PJ, for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, James. Appreciate it buddy.

Speaker: Thank you for listening to Crossing the Axis with James Keblis. If you're interested in joining the conversation or have a topic you'd like covered, please drop a note at keblis.com. That's K-E-B-L-A-S e b l a s dot