With the right partner, scaling is easy: BlackMatter Creative increases bandwidth with Dropbox Dash

Background

If anyone understands the value of a good partnership, it’s BlackMatter Creative. “Rather than working on a checklist of items, we partner with you to figure out your ultimate goal, then take you on a journey to understand what you need”, says Account Manager Jessica Lytle.

This authentic approach has helped BlackMatter build an impressive reputation and attract global clients from dozens of industries. But as a small business, they have to get the most from their internal resources. They rely on their toolkit to save time, improve output and make communication between team members and clients effortless.

“We’re a small agency. We collaborate with clients and outside creatives, whether that’s writers, copywriters, photographers or videographers. So making sure everybody has the tools that they need for us to kick off a project efficiently is a very important thing”, says Paul Woodard, President and Creative Director at BlackMatter Creative.

Challenge: a small agency with many moving parts

Before having those tools in place, starting a new project used to involve jumping through a lot of hoops.

“One of our biggest challenges was getting everything organised—from the elements and pieces we needed to the team members who were going to be on the project.”

For account managers like Lytle, the next biggest hoop was the project flow.

“Just keeping up with the work can be challenging”, she says. “We have so many projects going on and we really want to make sure that all of our clients’ priorities and deadlines are met. This means we must work as efficiently as possible.”

Apart from that, BlackMatter needed a reliable way to engage, support and manage clients from anywhere. The ability to work domestically and internationally was especially important to team members like Senior Designer Ben Gennetay.

“I work in France and my colleagues are in Oklahoma, so we need everything constantly shared. I’ve worked in creative agencies that didn’t have cloud software for storage before and it makes everything harder and adds extra hassle.”

Solution: spending less time searching and more time creating

BlackMatter connected with Dropbox, whose cloud-based platform initially helped the team store and organise large, client-provided assets.

“As a creative agency, we have a huge database of artwork, fonts and projects across a wide variety of clients, so Dropbox saves a lot of time”, Woodard says.

The team organises files by client in Dropbox, so they can drill down into project files to locate anything someone could possibly need for a given project. “Dropbox makes it really easy to jump from project to project, from client to client”, Lytle says.

As BlackMatter has grown, so too has their relationship with Dropbox. They became a member of the Design Partner programme and also adopted Dropbox Dash so team members could find files, images, videos and more across multiple work platforms. With these additional capabilities, the BlackMatter team can locate materials faster, organise projects more efficiently and communicate more effectively, all the things that give the team what they need to scale smarter and deliver work on tight timelines.

They’ve gone a step further, creating collateral faster with AI-powered analysis, summarisation and writing tools. Gennetay recently used Dash to start creating social media slides, feeding the software parameters about the number of slides and topics for each. It jump-started the creative thinking process so he could get to work refining it.

They're also using Dash AI features to highlight important details through a personalised chat. During a meeting, some clients asked Woodard about specific project details. He knew it was in an email somewhere but it would ordinarily take too long to find using search alone. “So, I jumped into Dash, typed a keyword into the search bar and it gave me an accurate answer straight away. I love that I can use Dash on the fly in a business meeting to give clients a great answer with the details they need.”

These moments matter, not only to build client confidence, but to stay on top of quickly changing timelines.

“Everything is so deadline-driven in our business and any extra second we can squeeze out of the day helps”, Lytle says. “Having one central location that can search across all of our creative files and pull out what we need is so efficient and we’re so excited to scale that.”

Results: juggling larger workloads with less effort

BlackMatter’s workload continues to swell. Increased work can mean increased stress but the team isn’t worried.

“Dash gives us the tools that we need to be more efficient so we can handle some of the new and bigger workloads that come through”, Woodard says.

Designers like Gennetay can’t imagine a day without the software. “Dropbox has changed my life, honestly. If there was no Dropbox, I wouldn’t be working for an agency in America.”

As the team had hoped, one of the biggest impacts has been on their ability to scale. Before Dropbox, the team was occupied with working on the day-to-day running of the business. Now that they don’t have to worry about organising, storing or sharing content, they’re free to be present with clients and have the conversations that spark their best creative work.

They also have more breathing room for tasks like website updates and tweaking product messaging. As the team continues to drive more clients, creative initiatives and partnerships, they know Dropbox is always there for support.

“Going through this process with Dash and working with the Dropbox team has really made us feel loved as a customer. It’s been a wonderful partnership”, Woodard says.