CRED Consulting

The Challenge

CRED had been using monday.com since COVID — adopting it early to manage the shift to remote work. For two years, the team used it. The boards were there. The tasks were logged.

But something wasn't right.

"We had an inkling that we're not using Monday well. I'm sure it can do things more streamlined to help us get what we want." — Abinaya Rajavelu, Director, CRED Consulting

The symptoms were clear:

• Resourcing was invisible. There was no way to see who was busy now, who had capacity next month, or whether the team could absorb a new job if it came in.

• 40+ boards to check manually. Each project ran on its own board, with its own column structures and conventions.

• Managers had to ask around. Staff filled in their own resourcing views by hand.

• Job profitability wasn't tracked at all.

"The likelihood is that we were making losses and we really had no way of knowing."

CRED didn't need a new tool. They needed an expert to show them what the tool they already had could actually do.

Why Kick Consulting

CRED reached out to Kick in October 2022. The problem they brought wasn't a list of features to implement — it was a sense that they were leaving significant operational value on the table and didn't know how to unlock it.

Working with Kick's Implementation Manager Lachlan, CRED began rebuilding their monday.com architecture from the ground up.

"Bringing Kick Consulting in has totally changed the game for CRED. We're so much more streamlined now — we didn't even imagine we could do this before."

What Changed

One architecture to replace forty boards

The single biggest structural change: consolidating 40+ individual project boards into a unified task architecture.

Previously, each project manager had their own board. Flexibility for individuals, chaos for the business. Lachlan's recommendation was to run all tasks in a single board — grouped by project — with everything rolling up into higher-level management boards above it.

This one change cascaded through every other improvement that followed.

Resourcing visibility — for a team running 60 jobs at once

With the architecture in place, CRED built a workload dashboard using monday.com's Workload Widget: a week view and day view of capacity across every staff member, updated in real time from actual task assignments.

Before this, managers had to ask around. Now the answer is visible at a glance: who's at capacity, who has room, and — critically — if a new job comes in over the next four weeks, who can actually take it on.

The rollout required change management. Some team members were initially uneasy about having their workload visible to leadership.

"They were like, are we going to be pegged against each other? Is it good for me to be red? But that was all just cultural expectation setting. We never knew this information before — and now that we do, we can manage better."

The approach was direct: leadership announced the rollout and committed to figuring out how to use it together, rather than debating whether to do it at all. The team is now fully on board.

Tracking profitability without timesheets

CRED had a cultural position against traditional timesheets. The problem: without some form of time tracking, job profitability was essentially unknown.

Working with Kick, CRED built a Make integration that calculates estimated cost per task based on who is assigned and their rate — without requiring staff to log timesheets. Jobs are now tracked against budget in real time, and the team can see whether a project is on track financially before it's too late to act.

Internal communication shifted out of email

Task-related communication has moved entirely into monday.com. Teams use Microsoft Teams for casual messaging, but anything related to a job lives in Monday — keeping the conversation attached to the work, visible to the right people, and searchable when needed.

The standout result: data that reshaped the business

The most significant outcome from CRED's monday.com implementation wasn't a workflow improvement. It was a strategic one.

CRED built a suite of business intelligence dashboards pulling data across all projects since 2021 — tracking revenue by service area, jobs by client, growth trends by market (NSW, Queensland, interstate), and subject matter expertise mix across the portfolio.

What the data revealed was uncomfortable: there was a fundamental mismatch between CRED's team structure and where the revenue was actually coming from.

"The technical social infrastructure work was a small team, but it was bringing in the most jobs and the most money. The skill mix didn't match the project mix — and that little team was always overloaded."

Abinaya used these dashboards to build the case for a structural change — presenting the data to co-directors and leadership to demonstrate the imbalance clearly.

"These dashboards are what I used to demonstrate to Sarah and the other leadership: there's a real mismatch in terms of the number of jobs the technical space brings and the money it brings, versus the team size running it."

The result: CRED restructured its team to create a more equitable balance between technical delivery capacity and strategic research skills. A hiring and resourcing decision, made with confidence, because the data was finally there to support it.

Where CRED is now

Three years into the relationship with Kick, CRED has moved from "tell us what to do" to "here's the problem we want to solve — help us build it." Abinaya now handles most configurations independently, bringing Kick in for complex builds or when stuck.

Lachlan regularly cites CRED as an example to other clients of what's possible within their monday.com package.

"We're probably one of the companies using Monday to its full potential in the package we have."

Advice for other businesses

On still using spreadsheets:

"Excel was like living in Stonehenge. It doesn't give you clarity, it doesn't give you a cohesive picture of what's going on. It's madness not to use Monday."

On using monday.com without expert support:

"As soon as you have a large number of jobs, a medium-sized team, and lots of different variables, it's almost crucial to bring in a consultant — even just to validate that you're doing the right thing and suggest optimisations."

🎯 Running lots of jobs with no visibility into capacity or profitability? That's exactly where CRED started. Book a free discovery call and we'll show you what your existing monday.com package can actually do. 👉 https://calendly.com/d/cpjm-szz-fpm

✅ Already on monday.com but not sure it's set up right? Start with a Free Health Check: https://www.kickconsulting.com.au/healthcheck