Company:
Cartel Creativo
San Antonio, Texas

Business:
Advertising

Staff:
45 full-time

System:
Clients & Profits Classic
Macintosh

Download (83k)

y 2005, one-third of the new workforce in the United States will be Hispanic, which will be by far the largest minority population in the country. But until recently, advertising and marketing to this growing and increasingly affluent demographic has been less than first class.

That's why Victoria Varela Hudson and Jesus Ramirez broke away from their former employer in 1994 to start Cartel Creativo, an agency dedicated to producing "in-culture" marketing communications for Hispanic consumers. In the early 90s, the concept of Hispanic marketing for many companies meant that American ads were simply translated into Spanish. Big-name agencies were selling Anglo interpretations of Hispanic culture. Cartel Creativo challenged this traditional formula and redefined Hispanic marketing with their proprietary (and trademarked) New School approach. The result has been advertising that is well-received by Hispanic consumers -- and effective enough to earn Cartel Creativo national accounts, including JC Penney, the U.S. Army, Allstate Insurance, and Chili's.

Keeping up

When Victoria and Jesus, Cartel's president and executive creative director respectively, started their business they began evaluating agency management systems. They bought Clients & Profits in March 1995 and immediately started using it to track time, create vendor invoices, and write checks. The agency was hot, snagging both new accounts and some of the best creative talent in the Southwest.

But keeping up with the burgeoning workload was a huge job. No one had time to lead the launch of Clients & Profits at the agency.

While Victoria and Jesus were convinced they had chosen the right software, they knew they needed help getting it implemented. In 1998 Cartel Creativo hired Frank Morales, an accountant with eight years of agency experience. More importantly, Frank had set up Clients & Profits at another mid-sized agency. "When I first came to Cartel Creativo," Frank says, "the staff was using less than half of the features in Clients & Profits. Business was growing so fast that time and costs weren't being entered consistently, and everyone was always in a time crunch." In the whirlwind of the agency's success, no one except Frank realized how Clients & Profits could help them work better.

The big picture

Frank immediately set up hands-on training sessions to get the entire staff familiar with Clients & Profits. They soon began to understand the system, starting with job tasks, time, job costs, and invoices. "The more the staff used Clients & Profits," Frank says, "the more quickly it became second nature to enter the information into it." Frank oversaw the creation of a Clients & Profits' in-house training course. The class showed the staff how work flows from clients to opening jobs, to costing and billing and, finally, to closing jobs. "Proper training of the staff was essential," Frank says, "to get them to use Clients & Profits." By the end of the training AEs, production managers, and the creative staff all understood that their data entry was critical to making the billing process fast and accurate.

more