Company:
EB Wall
Lenoir, North Carolina

Business:
Advertising/marketing

Staff:
9 full-time

System:
Clients & Profits Classic
Macintosh
AppleShare

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laywright George Bernard Shaw once said, "Things have not happened to me. On the contrary, it is I who have happened to things." The same could be said for small-town girl turned big-city cosmopolite Elisabeth Wall, founder of Lenoir, North Carolina's premier agency, EB Wall & Associates.

No shrinking violet, Elisabeth left her hometown in the early 80s to take Manhattan by storm. She charged up the corporate ladder, landing in the executive editor's seat for GQ magazine then later became the Director of Promotions and Advertising at Mademoiselle magazine. After growing weary of the day-to-day tumult, she and husband David longed for the easy southern ways they left behind.

In 1990, after starting their family in New York, they settled in Lenoir. The challenge was to pin down a career that was stimulating but still left time for her first priority, her family. With her background at Condé Nast, starting an advertising and marketing firm was a natural choice. After all, Elisabeth says, "it's easier to balance work and family when you're the boss." That year she opened up shop in her garage.

Muddling through

"I started out with a vision, a client, a really great designer, and a single Mac II ci," Elisabeth says. Her agency's client list quickly grew, and her staff soon

doubled. After muddling through paper time slips, POs, and job notes month after month, she realized the success of the agency -- and resulting administrative work load -- had knocked her life out of balance.

She knew she needed a management system, so she bought Timeslips to track time and an accounting software package to help track costs. Yet, she still had unfortunate adventures in billing. At the time, Elisabeth could be found in the garage at 2 or 3 a.m., calculator in hand, tallying time, and creating client bills from scratch. After five years, Elisabeth knew it was time to find something better.

Saved many midnight hours

Elisabeth had known about Clients & Profits for a little over a year before she took a serious look at how the software could help manage her agency. She realized that Clients & Profits could automate the time keeping, job costing, and client billing process much better than her current system.

She got Clients & Profits in August, 1995. "Buying Clients & Profits was a huge investment for us at the time," Elisabeth says. However, she knows they recaptured their investment within one month with more accurate time tracking alone. And it saved her the many midnight hours calculating billings as well. Now, with Clients & Profits tracking time and job costs,

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