For a company operating in the sometimes opaque world of marketing services, Forthea (opens in new tab) had its work cut out for itself—building a company based on transparency with its clients.
Named for both Fortuna, the goddess of luck and fortune, and Thea, the goddess of wisdom, the Houston-based internet marketing firm saw rapid growth thanks to the strategy that put an emphasis on clearly communicating value to clients in an industry that can be overwhelming for the uninitiated.
Yet, as it grew Forthea began to discover that managing the business with its existing mix of Microsoft Projects, Salesforce.com, QuickBooks and spreadsheets made that transparency a significant challenge.
Determining spend, time and budgets on a per-client basis became increasingly difficult to assemble with data spread across fragmented systems. Meanwhile, the call for transparency in advertising and marketing continued to grow.
Forthea knew it needed a modern, unified system that could give the business a single source of truth, quickly and easily to not only meet client needs and deliver on the promise it was founded upon, but could also improve efficiencies and scale with the business. After a comprehensive search that included Sage, Microsoft Dynamics GP and SAP, Forthea selected Oracle’s NetSuite as a unified system that could meet its needs across financials, CRM and project management.
The company is now able to monitor project performance and payments with real-time visibility, giving clients not only specific details on how Forthea is meeting their needs, but confidence in those numbers.
“Clients are constantly saying, ‘your accounting system is fantastic,” said Nick Lindauer, vice president of client services and operations for Forthea. Not something often heard at a marketing services company.
The ability to access that level of detail at a moment’s notice is significant given that Forthea has tripled in revenue, employees and client numbers since it launched NetSuite while keeping a lean finance staff. Meanwhile, it has improved quote times, proposals and visibility into the business without having to manage in-house servers and software.
Additionally, the flexibility of the system has allowed Forthea to customize NetSuite to some of its business and industry-specific needs.
“For someone that is growing and needs to get a 360-degree view of the company there’s no other platform that can do it like NetSuite,” said Chris Pappas, Founder and CEO. “We’re proof of that.”
For more on Forthea and what Oracle’s NetSuite can do for advertising and media companies, watch the video below and download the white paper A Buyer’s Guide to Business Management Software for Agencies and Marketing Services Firms (opens in new tab).
