Fortitude Family Office Case Study

Fortitude Case Study

Fortitude Family Office

Fortitude Family Office is a comprehensive financial services firm based in Scottsdale, Arizona. With a team of eight CPAs, they handle everything from high-level investments to managing the household payroll for their clients' staff. Their work is complex, high-touch, and billable at every level.

For Drew Phillips, Founding Partner and COO, time tracking isn't just a chore—it's the backbone of Fortitude's financial health. We sat down with Drew to discuss how integrating Timely into the firm's culture helped protect margins, drive fee renegotiations, and build a system that finally knows what its time is worth.

"Keeping track of time sucks. Timely is the tool that makes it suck less." — Drew Phillips, Founding Partner and COO

"Timely reduces the burden to a one-to-three-minute daily task. It's about making it as painless as possible."

Drew Phillips, Founding Partner and COO

"Because we could break down exactly where that time went—30% on tax, 20% on investments—we successfully renegotiated a higher fee. The client saw the value of the work and agreed."

Drew Phillips, Founding Partner and COO

"Keeping track of time sucks. Timely is the tool that makes it suck less."

Drew Phillips, Founding Partner and COO

The Challenge with Time Tracking

For many firms, time tracking is the administrative equivalent of eating your vegetables: you know it's good for you, but you'd rather be doing literally anything else. At Fortitude Family Office, the challenge wasn't just getting the team to track time—it was building a system that produced data precise enough to actually protect the firm's bottom line.

With complex billing models—flat fees, hourly rates, and assets under management (AUM)—Fortitude had no reliable way to know whether a "flat fee" engagement was draining their resources. Without granular time data, profitable clients and costly ones looked identical on paper.

"We had no way to know if an engagement had grown well beyond its original scope. We were flying blind." Drew Phillips, Founding Partner and COO

The firm also struggled with adoption. Moving a professional team from sporadic time tracking to consistent, accurate logging required more than just picking the right tool—it required building time tracking into the firm's culture from the top down.

The Solution

Fortitude chose Timely for its low-friction capture and its Memory feature, which allows team members to reconstruct their week accurately even if they prefer to log time in batches at the end of the week—a common real-world pattern that most tools fail to support.

"People don't want to do it. But Timely reduces the burden to a one-to-three-minute daily task. It's about making it as painless as possible." Drew Phillips, Founding Partner and COO

Leadership drove adoption by tying time logging directly to KPIs, performance reviews, and bonuses. Every Monday, the team reviews the previous week's data. Time tracking wasn't presented as overhead—it was positioned as a core professional responsibility with a direct line to compensation.

By structuring Timely to mirror Fortitude's internal systems and client classifications, Drew ensured that the data coming out was immediately actionable. The tool wasn't just tracking hours—it was mapping effort to clients, projects, and service lines in a way that made fee conversations concrete.

The Result

The impact was direct and measurable. Fortitude extracted data from Timely to compare expected annual revenue against actual hours spent per client—and the numbers were eye-opening.

"We discovered we had spent 4,800 hours on a single large family in one year. That's the equivalent of nearly three full-time employees." Drew Phillips, Founding Partner and COO

Armed with a breakdown showing 30% of that time on tax work, 20% on investments, and the rest across a dozen other service lines, Fortitude successfully renegotiated a higher fee. The client saw the data, understood the scope creep, and agreed.

The firm moved from roughly 60% time-tracking adoption to near 100%—not through coercion, but through culture. Adoption is now embedded in how Fortitude operates, with time data informing capacity planning, client reviews, and strategic decisions about which engagements to grow or renegotiate.

"We extract data from Timely to compare our expected annual revenue against actual hours spent. The engagement had grown well beyond the original scope." Drew Phillips, Founding Partner and COO

For a firm with complex billing models, Timely shifted Fortitude from guesswork to precision—turning a universally dreaded administrative task into a strategic advantage that directly protects the firm's bottom line.

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