The agency
profit gap
finally has a name

A CFO for every creative director

Picture a Monday morning at a 60-person advertising agency. The executive director wants to know if the big pharmaceutical client is profitable. The finance team starts pulling data from three different spreadsheets, two timesheets, and a billing system that hasn't synced since Thursday. By the time they have an answer, the meeting is over.

This is not a rare edge case. According to COR's own research, 66% of agencies do not accurately know how many hours they invest per project. Half of them have no real idea whether their team has capacity for the next pitch. And 42% would openly describe a significant portion of their client work as unprofitable - they just can't pinpoint why.

COR was built to make that Monday morning a non-event. The platform pulls time, resources, and project data into a single view, runs AI across the stack, and tells you - in real time - whether the numbers are working. No spreadsheet archaeology required.

The invisible tax on creative work

Professional services firms - agencies, consultancies, law practices, IT shops - have a structural peculiarity. They sell time. But they almost never accurately measure it. Timesheets are filled in on Friday afternoons based on imperfect memory. Project estimates are made on optimism. Scope creep is noticed after the budget is gone.

The result: rework absorbs 15-20% of billable capacity on average. Unprofitable clients get renewed because no one has the data to say no. Good project managers burn out carrying invisible overloads that don't show up in any dashboard. And the principals running these firms make strategic decisions based on gut feel dressed up as reporting.

This is a trillion-dollar problem dressed in khakis, sitting in a glass-walled office with a nice view. COR's bet is that it doesn't have to be.

Built by someone who felt the problem firsthand

Santi Bibiloni started his first company at 22. The Balloon Group, a Buenos Aires-based marketing agency, grew quickly. It also bled quietly. Not because the work was bad, but because nobody actually knew which clients were costing more than they were paying. Bibiloni watched the company operate on estimates, gut feel, and post-mortems that came too late.

In 2017, Bibiloni moved to Silicon Valley and started over - this time building the tool he wished he'd had. He brought along Jose Gettas as COO and Gabriel Marin as CTO. All three are Argentine. All three knew the professional services industry from the inside. The founding premise was simple: if you give agencies real data, they'll make better decisions. The tricky part was getting the data.

Software that reads timesheets so your team doesn't have to write them

COR's core insight is that the problem isn't that agencies lack dashboards. They have dashboards. The problem is that the data feeding those dashboards is wrong, late, or missing entirely. Manual timesheet entry is the culprit - not because people are dishonest, but because memory degrades fast, and nobody wants to spend Friday afternoons logging Tuesday's meetings.

COR solves this with AI-powered automated time tracking. The system learns from project structure, calendar data, and historical patterns to log hours passively. The result: accurate time data without the behavioral overhead that makes manual tracking fail. From there, the platform layers on profitability analysis, resource forecasting, and client-facing transparency tools.

The suite covers five operational surfaces. Project management handles task flow and client collaboration portals. Resource management gives principals a real-time view of who has capacity and who is overloaded. Profitability analytics surfaces margin by project, service, and client - with predictive alerts when a job is heading toward a loss before it gets there. COR Essentials offers entry-level access for smaller teams. And a consultative advisory layer includes quarterly business reviews benchmarked against industry peers.

Havas, Ogilvy, Publicis - and the investors who built the internet

When the world's largest advertising holding companies use the same tool, it stops being a recommendation and starts being a signal. COR's client roster reads like the attendee list at Cannes Lions. That's not a coincidence - it's what a 114% net revenue retention rate looks like when it compounds across a few years. Agencies that adopt COR don't leave.

The company is equally well-credentialed on the cap table. COR's seed round attracted the founders of DoubleClick (sold to Google for $3.1B), Anaplan, MercadoLibre, and Krux. Institutional backing came from ScOp Ventures - which also bet early on Procore - and Global Founders Capital, which has backed Slack, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Industry credibility was added through advisors including David Sable, former Global CEO of Young & Rubicam.

Revaluing the Professional Services Industry

COR's stated mission is to "accompany creative and professional teams in making decisions to increase their profitability, customer loyalty, and better organization of their work." The vision is more pointed: to make COR "the key to the revaluation of the Professional Services Industry."

That word - revaluation - is doing real work in that sentence. The professional services industry has a persistent undervaluation problem. Agencies chronically undercharge because they don't know their true cost of delivery. Consultants discount proposals because they can't accurately forecast utilization. Law firms bill by gut estimate because timesheet compliance is 70% on a good week.

COR's argument is that this isn't a character flaw - it's an information deficit. And information deficits are exactly what software is supposed to fix. The company certified as a Great Place to Work, expanded to 35+ countries, and built dedicated Culture & Talent roles into its org chart - signs of an organization that treats its internal operations with the same discipline it sells to customers.

Monday morning, solved

The agency CFO problem isn't getting easier. As AI automates creative production, agency value shifts toward strategic expertise and delivery efficiency. The firms that survive that transition will be the ones that know, at any given moment, whether the work they're doing is worth the hours they're spending. That's not a nice-to-have capability. It's the operating condition for staying solvent.

Back to that Monday morning meeting. The executive director wants to know if the pharmaceutical client is profitable. With COR, they open a dashboard. Real-time margin by client, updated automatically, benchmarked against industry peers. The meeting doesn't stall. The decision gets made. The team moves on.

That's what COR has been quietly building toward since 2017: a world where running a professional services firm requires the same quality of data as running any other kind of business. Not a revolution. Just a long-overdue upgrade to the information infrastructure of an industry that has been operating on guesswork dressed as process.

The bet from San Francisco, placed by three Argentines who'd felt the problem firsthand, is starting to look correct.