Studios, consultancies, production companies, design and digital agencies. Five people or fifty. Common Thread already knows the shape of how your business makes money, because it was built for agencies, and only agencies.
WHY WE BUILT IT THIS WAY →Same craft, different economics. Project-based, retainer-led, or a blend of both. Common Thread already knows the shape of how your business makes money.
Feast-or-famine pipelines and senior-led margin. We forecast around lumpy project revenue and show which work, and which clients, actually carry the studio.
Capacity that scales up and down per project. We track the freelance-vs-payroll mix and build the per-project cost stack so a booming month doesn't hide a thin one.
Blended rates and recurring revenue where utilisation makes or breaks you. We separate retainer economics from project work and surface utilisation by role.
Big campaign budgets where production and media spend dwarf your fee. We isolate your true creative margin from money that's only passing through the books.
Shoots, crews, kit and suppliers that swamp fee income. We strip pass-through costs out to show true margin, not a headline number that flatters the P&L.
Recurring retainers where profit lives or dies on servicing levels. We track recoverability against retainer scope so over-servicing shows up before it eats the margin.
Always-on output at pace, where throughput and utilisation decide profitability. We model the economics of volume work so growth doesn't quietly cost you money.
People are the product, so the people-cost ratio is everything. We manage the bench, track day-rate recoverability, and flag utilisation before it costs you.
The operating model of a creative business, applied to every number we show you.
Not one blended average, but the distribution across seniors, mid-weights, and juniors, where the truth hides.
The mix that flexes your capacity and your risk. Tracked as a lever, not a line item.
Two completely different economics. We model each on its own terms, not as one revenue blob.
What you can actually bill against what you delivered, before it silently erodes margin.
What you charge vs what the work truly costs to staff, by service line.
The single number that most determines whether an agency scales or stalls.
The constraint changes as you grow. Common Thread meets you at each stage, and grows with you.
You're winning work on instinct and it's going well, but you're flying blind on the numbers. Get visibility and control while the decisions are still small, so the growth ahead lands on solid ground rather than guesswork.
The spreadsheets and workarounds that got you here are creaking. Headcount is climbing, margins are harder to read, and cash is less predictable. Replace the sprawl with systems that scale as fast as you do.
You know what works. Now it's about tightening the operation to a standard: clean financials, benchmarked performance, documented operations, the foundations that make the business genuinely valuable, whatever you choose to do next.
FD-level financial operations, without the FD salary. You get the reporting, benchmarks, and forward view a finance director would build: accessible enough to run yourself, rigorous enough to trust.
We don't replace your FD. We give them agency-native infrastructure to work from, and give you real-time visibility alongside them. Less time assembling the numbers, more time acting on them.
No rip-and-replace. No new habits for the team. Common Thread connects your existing stack and does the interpretation.
Connects to Xero and QuickBooks and restructures your P&L into agency-native KPIs. Your books stay where they are.
Pulls from the pipeline and project tools you already run, so the picture is complete without changing how your team works.
We complement them, never replace them. In fact, a simple playbook gets your books to best practice, so monthly reporting just works.
Book a demo and we'll walk through your real data (utilisation, margin, runway) in the language your business already runs on.