How we run 60+ projects a year without losing sight of the numbers
Sixty-plus live projects, each with its own budget, team, and timeline. Bundl CFO Maxime Sureda explains how the firm keeps every one visible and profitable in real time, and why the answer was one connected system rather than five separate tools.
Key takeaways
- Depth beats breadth, but it costs you in resourcing.
- Visibility and time are the two things bad systems steal.
- The value sits in the connections, not the tools.
A corporate innovation firm is a creative business in many ways, tailored in nature and subject to mid-project flux. From where I sit, it's a common operational challenge to balance budgets, resourcing, and process consistency.
In any given year we've got 60+ projects live. Each has its own budget, its own team, its own timeline. And, keeping all of that visible, on-budget and profitable, without burying our people in admin, is the real job.
Our project teams are changing shape too. A few years ago, a project might run with two or three generalists. Now we're increasingly staffing T-shaped profiles: people with genuine depth in things like AI, automation, data analysis, app marketing and low-code development, alongside their broader skillset. That takes typical teams to four to six people (not all full time on a project), and it's lifted the quality of what we deliver considerably. The trade-off is real: matching that depth of expertise to the right project, across 60+ projects running at once, is a far more complex resourcing puzzle than staffing generalist teams ever was.
Our talent comes from all over the world, which keeps our thinking global and our clients, mostly in FMCG, retail and life sciences, well served. And because we work at the crossroads of product, service and business model design, often selling in MVP stages through our own sandboxing environment, we're reading real commercial signals early: cost of acquisition, churn, lifetime value. The numbers matter from day one, not just at the end.
All of that creates a genuine operational challenge. Sixty budgets. Dozens of teams. Constant movement. If your systems can't keep up, you lose two things fast: visibility and time. Both are expensive.
Funny enough, we found the fix through a neighbour. We share an office space with November Five, and I got talking to Thomas Sundert about ops (as one does), who recommended Productive.
It gives us one place for what used to live in five: resource planning, time tracking, budget management, and invoicing. For a CFO, that last part is the point. I can see where every project stands financially, in real time, without chasing a spreadsheet.
A few things that make it work in practice:
Connects our spend manager to Productive. This is the one I'd flag for any finance team. It ties spend directly to project budgets, so what a team spends and what the project is budgeted for sit in the same view. No reconciliation lag.
Keeps our knowledge in workspace. Our company wiki lives there, structured so people can find how we do things without having to ask.
Stores the sensitive work in our file manager. Collaborative, but secure enough for highly confidential client data.
Run support through team comms channels. Quick answers, no buried email threads.
None of these are exotic. The value is in how they connect, and in the discipline of using them the same way on every project.
Credit where it's due too: Matija Bermanec at Productive has been a properly good partner in getting us set up, quick to help and quick to understand what we actually needed.
The result: our teams spend their time on clients, not on planning, budgets or document management. That's what lets us run at the volume we do, and it's a big part of why Bundl is a place people want to build with.
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If you're running a portfolio of projects and drowning in the admin of it, it's worth a look.
Feel free to reach out to me on any of the above - maxime@bundl.com
