Company:
Brokaw
Cleveland, Ohio

Business:
Full Service Advertising

Staff:
50 full time

System:
Clients & Profits SQL
Windows 2000
SQL Server 7
Macintosh

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ill Brokaw has always been a visionary. He knew that his fledging advertising agency would grow -- and grow fast. In 1992, the economy was emerging from the Gulf War recession and Brokaw's new shop was ready for it. When the shop took off like a rocket, it pulled in clients and employees on the way up.

Other hot shops had collapsed under the stress of explosive growth before. But that wasn't for Brokaw. He knew he had to have a firm grip on the agency's fundamentals -- clients, jobs, costs, time, billings, and profit -- from the start. That's why he had his agency management system in place before hanging out the shingle. In fact, Brokaw had Clients & Profits up and running on the day he took his first phone call.

Leveraging the power of SQL

From day one, Brokaw was committed to Clients & Profits because of its ability to manage both creative and financials from one software. "I always liked the business logic of Clients & Profits," says Jim Kennedy, the agency's manager of information systems. "It very much fits the needs of the agency and the way we work -- and it's flexible."

But by 2001 the shop's Clients & Profits database had ten year's worth of job tickets, client history, and accounting data. The huge 600mb database let the staff search for estimates, client invoices, checks, and more for the entire life of agency, but at a substantial hit to its performance. "We have everything in there: every

PO, media buy, and a huge amount of time entries," Jim says. With such a large database, "it was getting slow, especially on the accounting side," he says, "and I was a little less than thrilled with the stability of the network." The agency was still growing fast, so a solution was needed before the database became a real problem.

The solution was Clients & Profits SQL, a client/server version of Clients & Profits Pro that uses Microsoft SQL Server. Brokaw was able to upgrade to Clients & Profits SQL and take advantage of the performance, scalability, and reliability of SQL without losing any of the agency's historical data. Because Clients & Profits SQL shares the same design as Clients & Profits Pro, it was an exceptionally easy upgrade, from both a technical and a user standpoint. "We shut the system down on a Friday afternoon," Jim says. "I expected to be here all weekend, but I went home Friday night."

Rolling out the upgrade to users was painless. There was no resistance from the staff to using Clients & Profits SQL, Jim says, because the upgrade's user interface -- its look and feel -- was identical to the program they'd used the day before.

Revving up a powerful, new management tool

Choosing a SQL-based system was the obvious answer, because it's an industry-standard way to manage large sets of data, especially if speed is an issue. "I looked at Clients & Profits SQL for speed, reporting, and responsiveness to users," says Jim.

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