Martin & Company

Martin & Company is an insurance services firm whose engagements ran on Excel project sheets and Bill4Time, about 50 users' worth of work in systems that did not connect to each other or to anything else. The CFO could not get reliable forward revenue numbers for budget planning. Nobody could see who would be over or under booked in the weeks ahead, and staffing a niche specialty, an actuary with workers compensation expertise for instance, meant asking around. When sales closed a deal in HubSpot, someone created the project by hand, with all the field omissions and delay that invites. Finance wanted a hard cut-over at a month end, for clean reporting periods, not a long stretch of dual systems.

We used to implement and support Wrike as a partner, and this is that work, delivered under an unlimited services arrangement that began in July 2025. We built a Wrike Pinnacle environment in which every client engagement becomes a project from a blueprint and native time logging replaces Bill4Time. Custom monetary and effort fields feed a backlog waterfall in Wrike Analyze showing remaining revenue and hours by month, filterable by client, service line, or fiscal period. The resource management module carries job roles and a custom skills field, so capacity and workload reports answer the staffing questions weeks in advance. A Wrike Integrate recipe watches HubSpot, and when a deal reaches closed won it creates the project from the correct blueprint, mapping deal value, client information, dates, and the assigned PM, and a companion automation creates the client folder in SharePoint and links it to the project. For the cut-over we bulk imported open projects and budgets, froze Bill4Time entries, turned on Wrike time logging for every user the next business day, and reconciled the overlap once. Training ran role-based, with recorded videos, playbook folders, and a hyper-care period.

By January 2026 the firm's own admins were running the system day to day, with our consultant alongside them in a weekly working session. Time is logged in Wrike, including flat-fee and monitoring work that previously had no home, and leadership works from dashboards of billable and non-billable hours. A billing rate updater tool lets the two finance roles maintain rates while practice leaders can see them but not change them, a permissions decision the team made itself in one of those sessions. The conversation had moved from rollout to refinement, such as how to represent effective rates on flat-fee clients, which task types to add as one-off work surfaced.

Given the same problem now we would build the firm its own practice management system that holds engagements, time, rates, backlog waterfall, and capacity in one database, with HubSpot feeding it directly and no per-user licensing for 50 staff. The Wrike build does what was asked of it. An owned build would take the flat-fee and effective-rate logic the team is now designing around the edges of the platform and put it in the core, because the system would be theirs.