Math was never really my thing. I majored in Eastern Philosophy with minors in Political Science and Creative Writing. True story: I was a Poli-Sci major, but I failed Statistics. Yeah, we had software that did the math, but we still needed to be able to show our work regardless and I couldn’t make heads or tails on a good day. I failed the math part of politics. A requirement for the major no less and, so, I had to make a change.
I went on to spend the majority of my career after college working for marketing agencies and in marketing technology for tech companies, safely and securely shielded from any need for mathematical acumen.I left that to the professionals. I mean, I’m not a data scientist for Pete’s sake. However, some of my best friends are. I rarely, really understand what they’re talking about, but they’re good people.
In the latest iteration of my career, I’ve chosen to go back to the commercial side of the game managing customer accounts, which is where I began my agency life. Much like college, the numbers stressed me out and I shifted to creative strategy–which I’m pretty damn good at–to avoid any opportunity for discomfort. Math made me uncomfortable. I don’t know why. Maybe because it appeared to be so clear cut. One answer to every problem and that didn’t reflect the life I’d led. Maybe that made me feel like I was the chaos and perhaps I was unworthy. Or maybe the confidence of math made it all feel less like wonder and I was always firmly pointed toward the wonder.
So, outside of a checkbook and counting reps at the gym, I just didn’t do math.
But now I have to!
Good gravy, so much of my job is math! SoW’s, hourly rates, discounts, projected burn rates, revenue projections. Lots and lots of projections, because budgets are fickle things.
I’m still shaky with it, but I do it and it’s getting easier with time, kind of like parenthood (until you reach the teenage years, which I assume is the equivalent of calculus).
Recently I was faced with a situation where a customer needed me to articulate the various ways that they’d spent their billable hours with my team. Billable hours are everything in agency-land. The hourly rate (by resource), average hours billed per week, the burn rate of utilized hours against the contract. Many clients obsess over these details. Which, if I’m honest, often makes me sad because it’s indicative of a desperate effort to define and derive value. As a client partner, I work hard to point toward a different set of key performance indicators (KPI’s) more closely associated with business performance and to make sure it’s clear how my team contributes to them, but at the end of the day, you never really get away from frequent and existential conversations around the number of hours your project manager billed and why. I’m also not billable, which means I am an expense, which means I need to do a very good job of defining value for my customers.
For this customer, it was a very specific way they wanted to see hours tracked and we’d only begun tracking the hours to their specifications halfway through the project. But I was able to look at their hours during the second half of the project and break them down by percentage of time spent. I was then able to apply those same percentages to the first half of the project to give them a sense of what the actuals could look like. Simply put, if a resource billed 5% of their overall time during the second half of the project, I projected their total time spent for the entire duration based on that 5% second half indicator. I was also clear to make sure they understood that these were approximations based upon data.
Finally, to provide some additional validation I did some heuristic analysis of the notes that the team members applied to their hours, looking for certain keywords, and this backed up my projections. Thankfully billable resources are as stressed about proving their value as I am, so they tend to leave detailed project notes when they bill their time and I was able to search and aggregate this unstructured data to reveal a frequency pattern of references to customer deliverables that aligned with my projections.
Sweet!
I started with an incomplete data set and I made sense of something senseless. I did math!
And honestly I’m filled with so much pride and joy because this made me realize that math isn’t this monolithic, black and white process. It’s a method that we can use to make sense of the world around us. A language we can use to speak clearly to, and translate complexity. And contrary to my previous experience, there wasn’t just one answer to any question. There were in fact a multitude!
I learned some other, more practical, things too. While this exercise was “fun,” I now kick off projects with my project manager by defining very specific subtasks to include in time tracking, so that we don’t need to rely upon projections and heuristics. This involves working with the customer–sometimes pushing the customer–to articulate the data points that will be valuable to them in reporting. In other words, which numbers matter most.
Am I comfortable? No. But I get it now. Math is my tool. It’s a part of me.
Reggie Wideman is a writer and strategist who works with brands to better leverage marketing technology.