Field Notes
Essays from inside a 120-person digital agency on Jira — written by Ernest. Project margin, estimating, the architecture of profitability, and the small decisions that compound. No content marketing.
A first-person decision guide on when to hire a finance director at a digital agency: the ladder from bookkeeper to management accountant to fractional FD to full-time CFO, mapped to size and the cadence of decisions you actually need.
We had been carrying three retainers for years that the spreadsheet pack reported as marginally profitable. Once the live margin layer was in, every one of them was negative. We cancelled all three inside a quarter. The shape of the conversations, and what an agency owner discovers about themselves when the numbers stop hiding.
An anonymised post-mortem on a project that looked profitable on the invoice and bled quietly underneath. The exercise that turned the 50-person agency I was CTO of into a 120-person agency that knows where its margin actually goes.
An honest post-mortem on two finance leaders who did everything right and still couldn't fix our margin. The lesson: the problem was the cadence, not the person. What an agency CFO actually does once the P&L runs in real time.