About
Trade Lions LLC
Trade Lions is a promotional marketing agency that provides and coordinates turnkey staffing experiences for events. As a regional agency, they manage a promotional team across five southeastern states. Trade Lions is more than just a business that staffs events, they aim to be an extension of their clients’ growth.
Founded By: Jayke Milton
Learn more: trade-lions.com
— THE TASK AT HAND
A promotional marketing agency needed help to keep up with the demands of their fast-growing business. Rather than invest in additional administrative headcount, they sought out a software solution to manage and operate their business. After using another platform that failed to meet their needs, they adopted PINATA and have scaled their business like never before.
— QUICK WINS
• More Profit. Less Headcount.
Since implementing PINATA, Trade Lions has been able to take on more events with the same number of operational employees, resulting in a “monumental gain” in terms of month-over-month profitability.
• More Collaboration. Less Effort.
Trade Lions has streamlined their communication with brand ambassadors by managing staffing, assignments, communications and relevant information in PINATA, thus eliminating thousands of disparate emails, texts and calls per month.
• More Structure. Less Chaos.
The structure that the PINATA platform provides has helped Trade Lions’ Brand Ambassadors to act with more independence and autonomy. With that, operations have been streamlined and there is greater efficiency both in the field and for those managing events.
• More Accuracy. Less Guesswork.
Billing and payments for Trade Lions’ Brand Ambassadors were always laborious and sometimes accuracy suffered from having to work in a number of different systems. With receipts and billable hours all housed in PINATA, they have gained greater financial efficiency.
Jayke MIlton
Founder, Trade Lions Agency
“Since using PINATA I can hands down say it has allowed me to reclaim 60 hours a month of my own time that I can now use to drive the business forward. While the time it has saved me is immense, the time it has saved my employees is triple that. That gives us the bandwidth to do things that aren’t necessarily in our job description to better serve our clients.”
- Jayke Milton, Founder, Trade Lions Agency
— THE CHALLENGE
Before PINATA, Trade Lions relied on Google sheets, calendars, Excel files and timesheets from their contractors to schedule, assign and pay their talent. As Trade Lions grew from a small agency to a regional powerhouse, they needed help to not only continue their growth trajectory but to simply keep up with the influx of business.
“It got to a point where I would need to hire more staff to do the manual work that had to be done on the back end to make our business run efficiently,” Milton said. “I thought to myself ‘there has to be some kind of technology solution out there that solves these problems without having to dump more money into additional staff.’”
— THE SOLUTION
After another software platform failed to meet their needs, Trade Lions engaged PINATA for a trial run in their new Tennessee market. The results were impressive—providing a single source of truth from their events via actionable reporting and eliminating the need to use different systems and spreadsheets. After the trial, Trade Lions adopted PINATA across the board and their business has thrived ever since.
“With PINATA, everything is simplified—I have everything I need in one place at my fingertips,” Milton said. “I have so much more control over my business at a glance. I know which events we’ve worked, where recaps were filled out, how much contractors are owed, what they need to be reimbursed for, etc. It’s all one closed loop as opposed to going through nine different spreadsheets to figure out that information. Having better command of that information helps me to drive my business forward.”
— ROI
OPTIMIZATION
PINATA’s scheduling, assigning and reporting functionality has helped Trade Lions scale their business while keeping operational staffing levels the same. In fact, Trade Lions estimates that they’ve been able to take on twice the amount of events since using PINATA with the same number of employees as before.
“If you took away PINATA, I would probably need to add four to five more employees to be able to handle the volume of work that we’re doing now,” Milton said. “That all comes out in the profit margins for us which is monumental in terms of the month-over-month profitability of the company.”
Beyond that, Trade Lions has greatly improved their billing and payment accuracy since adopting the PINATA platform.
“Having billable hours and expense tracking in one place as opposed to several different systems makes PINATA a game changer for us,” Milton said. “There’s no doubt in my mind that PINATA has improved our financial efficiency in terms of paying our people. That all comes out in the margins in terms of the business we do every month.”
—STREAMLINED
COMMUNICATION
Since implementing PINATA, Trade Lions has gained newfound efficiency when communicating with brand ambassadors, clients and accounts.
When managing brand ambassadors and coordinating events, the Trade Lions team used to need up to 10-plus touchpoints with a contractor to set them up for success. Now, with everything living on the PINATA platform, those email exchanges, phone calls, texts and calendar invites are a thing of the past.
Improved communication with clients since coming onto the PINATA platform has also been a huge benefit for Trade Lions. Being able to upload products for a client into PINATA one time and then having those SKUs live on the platform and be available anytime a program is selected, has eliminated additional back-and-forth with the brand.
“We are doing hundreds more events a month than we were this time last year.” Milton said. “Between the streamlined communication with contractors and clients around these events, PINATA has saved us thousands of monthly interactions right there.”
Finally, before PINATA, Trade Lions used to batch reports and send them to their clients at the end of each month. Now, those same clients can log into the PINATA Client Portal for free to view reports, check the upcoming schedule and download data visualizations to be used for quarterly reports and more.
— THE LAST WORD
As an agency customer, Trade Lions reaps the benefits of being in the PINATA Priority Referral Network.
“PINATA has definitely sent business our way which is another benefit we’ve seen since being on the platform,” Milton said. “PINATA has been a great partner in that regard which goes a long way for us.”
The Trade Lions team sees their use of PINATA as a competitive advantage that has helped them drive new business.
“We’ve added a page to our agency deck outlining our usage of PINATA and the subsequent benefits to our clients,” Milton said. “That has helped us close some opportunities and open doors that wouldn’t have been open otherwise. PINATA has 100-percent been a competitive advantage for us.”