Alex Rowlands, Group Finance Director, on what really keeps a fast-growing creative agency running and how timesheets can reveal more than you expect.
For an agency whose work spans Champions League finals, global gaming launches and the noisier corners of entertainment culture, Ear to the Ground has always understood what drives people. The rhythms of fan behaviour, the cultural memes that matter, the moments that turn audiences into communities.
But even the sharpest cultural instincts don’t automatically translate into operational clarity. As the company grew from a small independent agency into a £20m global creative agency with global clients and staff approaching 80, a different kind of understanding became essential: a clear view of how the business itself was working.
At some point, someone has to know where the time goes.
That someone, for the past seven years, has been Alex Rowlands, the agency’s Group Financial. He arrived when Ear to the Ground was a 28-person team working with little commercial insight. Today, he oversees a finance function that is quietly supporting the agency’s rise, backed by a system he has known for much of his career.
Alex’s relationship with Paprika goes back more than a decade. At Gyro, where he spent 5 years as Senior Management Accountant (EMEA), he built the timesheet and commercial reporting that would later become the template for much of the rollout. When Gyro was acquired by Dentsu, Alex took on a role as Financial Controller post acquisition, leading the implementation of Paprika across Dentsu's creative agency network in London. It gave him thorough understanding of what the platform could do at scale, and what agencies typically got wrong in the early stages of adoption.
When he moved to Ear to the Ground, the contrast was immediate. “We had poor commercial insight,” he says. Once the agency started growing quickly, “understanding how we should price, what products and services we sell that make the most money, and how the team was spending their time was really important.”
About a year into the role, he brought Paprika in and retired the legacy system. It was, he says, less a technology decision and more a matter of long-term viability. “Without that data people are just going off opinion and gut.” The role of finance is to provide leadership with key information to make informed business decisions.
Timesheets became an integral part of that shift. They were a key aspect to understand how the agency’s hours, talent and energy were being spent.
Ear to the Ground was encountering the same pressures familiar to many growing companies - resources struggling to keep pace with the speed of double digit growth.
“When demand goes up, resource becomes more scarce and efficiency really matters,” Alex says. “You need to know which services you are pricing correctly and what it is you deliver really well and what you are best at, to drive value for clients.”
Paprika’s appeal was its simplicity. Finance, invoicing, purchase orders and timesheets sit in one place, with data updating quickly. Where other agencies piece together separate tools for projects, resourcing and finance, Paprika gives a single source of truth: one system the whole agency works from, with operational and financial data connected rather than siloed. But it also became the foundation for commercial decisions. Alex describes its approach as “flashlight reporting”, a way of illuminating parts of the business that are being overlooked.
“It’s shining a spotlight on an area where the agency’s focus should be instead of getting distracted in the day to day.”
That connected system also changed how the wider team worked. As Ear to the Ground grew from £6 million to £20 million in turnover, the finance team headcount stayed flat. Paprika made that possible by giving everyone direct access to the information they needed. Project teams could check invoice status, payment history and job details without going through finance. "Once they realised they could be self-sufficient, they really liked the system."
The alternative would have been a queue. A long one.
One of the clearest examples is the agency’s client profitability quadrant, a simple grid that has become a decision-making tool. Ideal clients sit in one corner (high value and high profitability). High value but low profitability accounts in another. A third contains the small but efficient projects that may not pay handsomely but carry strategic weight. And then there is the final corner.
“The death box,” Alex says, where clients with low value and low profitability sit.
The quadrant doesn’t offer answers, but it forces questions. Why is a relationship drifting? Is the process wrong? Is the pricing wrong? Has something changed on the client side? “As an agency you want to be the first to call out if something’s not working.”
Paprika’s forecasting adds another layer. By comparing actual and planned time, the agency can see long before a project ends whether it is veering off course. “If you’re tracking over on a project at the 30% stage, you’ve got enough time to remedy that.”
Perhaps the most unexpected use of Paprika has been around staff welfare. Ear to the Ground knows its employees are a key asset to success as an agency and for its clients. As they work with some of the world's biggest brands delivering events around the world, burnout is a real business risk and timesheets are a way for leadership to notice strain before it causes harm.
“We track the rolling four-week average of our employees. Anyone who is 10% over, we have a mandatory HR check in.”
The agency’s next step is to break its project data into finer categories, splitting work by type, production, talent, strategy, to understand which services are most in demand and which are most profitable. Alex is candid about the risk agencies run of looking inwards too often. The data corrects that: it shows what clients are buying rather than what the agency assumes they want, and where clients haven’t yet been introduced to the full breadth of what Ear to the Ground offers.
That gap between assumption and reality is where the next round of growth is. Paprika’s project-level data makes it visible.
Through it all, timesheets remain a quiet but vital constant. “Timesheets are not a charging model,” Alex says. They’re an internal tool, a way of understanding how long things take, where things go wrong and how to make better decisions with the aim of maximising value for our clients. Ear to the Ground has moved to value and output-based pricing. Having done the same services long enough to know what they cost to deliver, the agency prices on outcomes rather than hours. Timesheets still matter, but as a backstop: a way of catching when something is tracking wrong and asking why, not as the basis for a client invoice. “After you know how long something takes,” Alex says, “it should be based on value and outputs, with any time efficiencies focused on improving the quality of your output for clients.”
That philosophy, outputs over hours, data over instinct, is what seven years of building on Paprika has made possible. The legacy system went, the spreadsheets went, and the guesswork largely went too. In a business built on creativity and cultural understanding, that kind of clarity is a commercial imperative.
Want to see what Paprika could do for your agency? Book a demo with the team: https://www.paprika-software.com/book-paprika-demo
