Company:
The Creative Department,
Cincinnati, Ohio

Business:
Ad studio

Staff:
17

System:
Clients & Profits Pro
Macintosh & Windows
Windows NT

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he first thing you notice about the Creative Department's work is their great creative: riveting graphics, mouth-watering copy, and tight design. And not just for one or two adventurous clients, either. Whether they've produced print advertising,direct mail pieces, or a complete web site, everything they've done has been exceptional. That's not surprising, because the Creative Department is staffed entirely with creatives. They don 't have a bookkeeper to crunch numbers. Or AEs to block communications with clients. They're a bunch of creatives doing what they love to do,doing it well, and making money doing it.

In 1992, copywriter Steve Deiters and two art directors, Dave Fagin and Lauren Mueller, decided to start a "strictly creative" agency. They staffed the shop with art directors,writers, designers, web programmers, and print production people. Now with 17 employees, the Creative Department is crammed into a brick-and-mortar building in Cincinnati 's historic Rhine district. The location, which has been dubbed the Digital Rhine for all the high-tech and dot-com businesses setting up shop in the area, is strategic for the Creative Department 's growing web site development business.

You don't have to be an accountant

"We 're all creatives with no beancounter mentality,"Steve says. In mid 1999, he started looking for agency management software that could do it all -- job tracking, costing,billing, and accounting. The company had grown increasingly frustrated with their accounting system, a Quicken/Microsoft Works mishmash that wasn't giving them all the information they needed. He took a look at Clients & Profits when he read that you don 't have to be an accountant to use it.

Although nothing close to an accountant, Steve, a perfectionist by nature, was elected Chief Number Guy (not to mention Partner with the Most Congenial Phone Manners for two years running). After evaluating Clients & Profits for three-and-a-half months, Steve decided to buy Clients & Profits Pro. ("I can recognize the software as a thing of beauty, and I 'm not even an accountant," Steve says.) Only two months later, he knew it was just what they needed -- and better than he had even hoped. First, the shop got the job tracking functions in place, then tackled the accounting. "I 'm just learning my way around right now," Steve says, "but every time I turn a corner, I find another feature that blows me away."

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