CASE STUDY
BLUE CORONA
Data-savvy marketing company credits Central Desktop for dramatic boost in
net income; consolidates project management and file sharing in the cloud
Highlights
THE PROBLEM
Blue Corona sought a robust collaboration solution to meet
its needs as the company scaled. Specifically, the company
needed to leverage project dependencies and find a single
solution that could handle both project management and file
sharing, while also providing a home for client-facing projects.
THE SOLUTION
By moving away from Box and Basecamp in favor of Central
Desktop, Blue Corona consolidated all of its client activity in
a single platform. Additionally, the Central Desktop-powered
intranet serves as a critical communication hub for the
company’s multiple offices.
THE RESULTS
With a better handle on workflow, Blue Corona now is able
to tackle more clients and client projects simultaneously.
Company president Ben Landers credits Central Desktop
with helping to power an 800 percent increase in net income
in 2013, and then a 100 percent year-over-year income gain
in 2014.
Central Desktop vs. Basecamp
“The thing that really drives me, as well as our entire
team, is helping businesses grow,” says Blue
Corona president Ben Landers. This commitment
has sparked his own company’s growth; founded in
2007, Blue Corona has now been on the Inc. 5000
list three consecutive times and made the Inc. 500
in its first year of eligibility.
“Every single person on our team lives
and breathes in Central Desktop
throughout each and every day .”
- Ben Landers, president, Blue Corona
Blue Corona’s approach is unique in that it targets
primarily local companies. “While the term
‘analytics’ has been seen for years in the pages of
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“After switching to Central Desktop, we quickly
realized how Basecamp had limited us .”
- Ben Landers, president, Blue Corona
Harvard Business Review, not many
companies offer real analytics services
for relatively small, local companies,”
he says. “That’s what we do. We collect
data most companies have never had
access to, and we translate it into
action, and, more importantly, tangible
business results.”
With growth comes new complexities,
and Blue Corona discovered fresh
technical challenges as its success
spread. Some of the tools and
processes that had worked well in the
beginning began to show limitations.
After three years of using Basecamp
for project management, Landers
realized that his team had outgrown
its technology. But change couldn’t be
taken lightly.
“Basecamp was a great entry-level
project management tool, but as
our company grew, it became too
lightweight for our needs,” says
Landers. “The simplicity of Basecamp
and the length of time we’d been using
it definitely meant that we were going
to have to take a careful and deliberate
approach to making a change.”
After considering several collaboration
options, Blue Corona switched to
Central Desktop in July 2013. The
results were fast—and dramatic.
“After switching to Central Desktop, we
quickly realized how Basecamp had
limited us and how many processes we
had developed around its limitations,”
Landers says. “With Central Desktop,
we found the opposite to be true—we
are able to come up with processes and
procedures that make the most sense
for us and then customize Central
Desktop to follow them.”
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No more silos, no more Frankenstein solutions
Blue Corona serves as a “virtual online marketing
manager” for its clients, optimizing advertising
campaigns, building websites, running email
marketing programs, solving SEO woes, and
much more. As a forward-thinking, analyticssavvy organization, it’s tracking and optimizing a
tremendous amount of information for its clients.
Critical files, tasks and
correspondence are all
contained within shared,
secure workspaces .
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To help turn data into action, Blue Corona previously
leaned on Basecamp for project management while
using Box for file sharing. A client contract wasn’t
necessarily in the same place as client-related
spreadsheets. Discussions surrounding those contracts
and spreadsheets may have been occurring somewhere
else altogether.
With Central Desktop, Landers and his team were able
to consolidate all client project information in a single
location in the cloud, eliminating the need to scatter
across multiple software platforms. When solutions
are stitched together, something typically falls between
the cracks. Time gets squandered on searches for a
particular document or conversation thread. Critical
client information gets locked in silos.
Multiple collaboration solutions
fused together ?
What a monstrosity !
“As Blue Corona grew, our staff grew with it and we
needed [a collaboration solution] that was significantly
more robust,” says Landers. “We needed something that
allowed for project dependencies. We needed a solution
that married project management with file sharing. We
needed a platform that could be customized for both
internal and external client-facing projects.”
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The impact on client delivery and
company management
When Blue Corona brings a new
client on board, the sales and
marketing teams get busy setting up
workspaces for those clients within
Central Desktop. Client agreements
are uploaded to the workspace. The
account managers create online
documents in Central Desktop that
serve as “living client notepads.” The
client services team creates project
plans using tasks and milestones.
At the executive level, Blue Corona’s
leadership team created an intranet
in Central Desktop to share vital and
timely company information, keep
employees in multiple offices feeling
like they’re working on the same team,
remind everyone of shared goals, and
reinforce the “culture of ownership”
that Landers prizes.
Blue Corona’s intranet keeps company
goals constantly top of mind .
“Our team truly understands what it
means to ‘think and act like an owner,’”
he says. “They treat Blue Corona as if
it’s their business, and they apply the
same thinking to each of our clients.”
From project minutiae to companywide big pictures, all of the action is
happening in Central Desktop.
“Every single person on our team lives
and breathes in Central Desktop
throughout each and every day to get
both internal company news and to
deliver on client work,” says Landers. He
adds that he’s also considering offering
access to Central Desktop workspaces
to all of Blue Corona’s clients.
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The ROI of Central Desktop
“Calculating the ROI of advertising,
marketing and websites is a big part of
our business,” says Landers. “At the same
time, I doubt we could put an exact figure
on the increased collaboration enabled
by implementing Central Desktop. I’m not
sure it even makes sense to try. As Gary
Vaynerchuk says, ‘What’s the ROI of your
mother?’ No one can answer that question,
but I think we’d all agree that we owe it all
to our mothers!”
Landers credits Central Desktop with
improving how his team manages client
workflow. Having unlocked greater
efficiency, Blue Corona maximizes the
number of clients and projects it can tackle
simultaneously. That’s a significant win for
any company—but it’s not what Landers
focuses on when asked about ROI.
“From my perspective as the leader of
the company, the largest return from
implementing Central Desktop, and
what allowed us to increase our net
income by 800 percent in 2013 and more
than 100 percent in 2014 vs. 2013, is the
custom workspace used to host Blue
Corona’s intranet,” says Landers. “In my
experience, most people who fail to meet
their goals do so because they lose sight
of them. Blue Corona’s intranet powered
by Central Desktop helps us ensure that
what’s truly important—our mission, core
values, short-term/long-term goals, etc.—
is on the top of everyone’s minds daily.”
Central Desktop powers short-term revenue
growth while also keeping team members
focused on long-term goals .
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About Central Desktop
Central Desktop helps people work
together in ways never before possible.
The Central Desktop collaboration
platform connects people and
information in the cloud, making
it possible to share files, combine
knowledge, inspire ideas, manage
projects and more. Central Desktop
serves half a million users worldwide.
Key Central Desktop customers
include CBS, MLB.com, PGA Tour,
the Humane Society of the United
States, CareerBuilder, Javelin
Marketing Group, Moxie, WD-40,
Workday and more. Founded in 2005,
Central Desktop is a PGi company
located in Pasadena, California.
Click here to learn more
about Central Desktop
(C’mon just click it !)
Contact us
We don’t bite
866 900 7646
centraldesktop.com
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