We doubled our active retainers in nine months and somehow our team is less stressed than before. The trick was a workspace that does the boring parts for us.
I'm Daan, founder of Helix. We do paid media for SaaS — small budgets, lots of accounts. When we were at 18 clients we already felt at the wall. Now we're at 40 and honestly things feel more under control. Here's the long version of how Logbook helped that happen.
“We almost hired a project manager. Instead we hired Logbook. It does the parts of the PM job nobody actually wants to do — chasing logs, generating reports, keeping the brief in one place — and frees the team to do the work clients pay for.”
Where we were
I was the bottleneck and the bottleneck was me.
So Helix is me, two senior strategists, four media buyers, two creatives and a half-time analyst. Nine of us. We do paid media for SaaS — mostly LinkedIn and Google, some Meta. Average client spends like €15-25k/month and we charge a retainer plus a small percent on top.
When we hit 18 clients, things stopped fitting in my head. I was the one doing weekly check-ins, writing reports, chasing buyers for their hours, making sure briefs got handed off cleanly. By month four of being at 18 clients I'd basically stopped doing any actual marketing strategy. I was a really expensive PM. And I was bad at it.
18 → 40
Active retainers
We didn't plan this. We just stopped saying no when leads came in, because the team had capacity now that PM admin wasn't eating their day. Nine months from start of rollout to today.
Zero
PM hires
We had two interviews scheduled for a senior PM role. I cancelled them in week three of using Logbook. Saved us about €78k/year before benefits.
63%
Drop in Slack messages
We measured before and after with Slack analytics. Most of the drop is just 'where's the report' / 'did you log time' / 'what's the status' style messages. They moved to the card, where they belong.
What we tried before
Two failed attempts before we tried something else.
Before Logbook our reports were a nightmare. Each media buyer kept their own Google Sheet of hours. Each strategist kept their own Notion page of what was happening. Every Monday I'd merge them into a deck for the client. It would take me three hours per client. With 18 clients that's a full Monday and most of Tuesday gone.
I tried to fix it twice. First with a Notion template. Didn't work — buyers wouldn't update it. Then with Asana plus Toggl plus a Zapier setup that cost €200/month and broke once a week. Also didn't work.
The shift, in three phases
We didn't try to do everything at once. Three phases over a month.
- 1
Phase 1 — Boards
Move every active client onto a board
Took us a weekend. Each retainer gets a board with the same five columns. Buyers move their tasks across. Strategists watch from above. The board is the project. Everything else attaches to it.
- 2
Phase 2 — Time on the card
Kill the time-tracking sheet
Turned out media buyers don't mind tracking time, they mind switching to a different tool to do it. Once the timer was on the card, adoption was instant. We went from 60% logged hours to 96% in two weeks.
- 3
Phase 3 — Auto reports
Stop writing reports manually
This was the unlock. Logbook generates the weekly summary per client from the card activity and time logs. I just review it for tone, add a paragraph of strategy commentary, and send. Three hours per client became fifteen minutes.
What a Monday looks like now vs nine months ago.
Before
The old way
- I'd open 18 Google Sheets to merge time logs
- I'd write 18 client reports manually in 3-hour chunks
- Buyers would Slack me asking 'what's the priority for client X this week?'
- Strategy time was somewhere between 'occasionally' and 'never'
- I genuinely thought we needed to hire a PM at €70-80k/year
After
With Logbook
- Reports auto-generate Sunday night, ready for me Monday morning
- Each report takes me 10-15 min: read, edit tone, add strategy note, send
- Buyers self-serve priorities from the board. They tag me when they need a call
- I do strategy work Monday-Wednesday. Like, actually
- We grew from 18 to 40 clients with the same team. PM role still vacant by choice
“I think the part nobody talks about with project tools is that the bad ones make you do more admin. The good ones make admin disappear. Logbook is the second kind. That's it. Thats the whole pitch.”
Daan Vermeulen
Founder, Helix Marketing
The not-so-perfect parts
One thing I want to be honest about — we did have one client who hated being onboarded into the portal. They'd been used to PDF reports and email check-ins. We just kept sending them the PDF for three months until they came around. You don't have to force the portal — it shows up when clients are ready for it.
Also our analyst Sara found a bug in week two where the report wouldn't pick up campaigns we'd renamed mid-month. The Logbook team fixed it in like 48 hours. Felt good to be heard. Small thing but worth saying.
€72k
Total saved year 1
€48k from not hiring a PM (partial year, deferred), plus €18k from cancelled tools (Asana team, Toggl, Loom team, Zapier paid plan, Notion enterprise), plus €6k in saved senior strategy hours we billed instead.
96%
Hours logged accurately
Up from 60% on the old Google Sheet system. The on-card timer is the only reason this works. Buyers won't switch apps to log time. Period.
Where we go from here
Hiring strategists, not project managers.
We're 40 retainers now and we're starting to think about hiring our 10th person — but a strategist, not a PM. That feels like the right kind of growth. We get to spend money on the people who do the actual work clients pay for.
If you run a marketing shop and you're stuck somewhere between 'we should systemise this' and 'we should hire a PM' — try Logbook for a quarter. Worst case you're out a few hundred euros. Best case you skip the hire and double your client list. That was our case anyway.
Run your retainer book on one workspace.
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