Marcel Petitpas had a problem. As an agency owner, he kept asking himself simple questions like "Are we actually making money on this client?" and "Should we hire someone or let someone go?"
But getting answers required wrestling with messy data scattered across multiple tools, and nobody seemed to have figured out the right formulas anyway.
So he built Parakeeto, the world's first "Profit Management Firm."
Seven years later, he still has no direct competitors and pulls in over seven figures annually. But that blue ocean came with an unexpected challenge: teaching the entire market what profit management actually is.
What Parakeeto Actually Does
Think of Parakeeto as the bridge between your finance team, your operations people, and your sales crew. They pull together data from all three to help agencies and professional services firms understand how they're really performing, why things are going the way they are, and what to do about it.
It's part consulting, part technology, part coaching. The core promise is simple: we worry about the numbers so you don't have to.
| Service | What It Includes | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Profitability Assessment | Data collection, analysis, roadmap development, consulting | One-time project |
| Profit Management Plan | Ongoing data collection, cleaning, reporting, regular coaching | Ongoing relationship |
The Problem Nobody Was Talking About
Marcel wasn't solving a theoretical problem. He lived it. When he ran his own small agency, margins kept getting tighter. His team had access to more data than ever before, but lacked the frameworks and understanding to actually use it.
The questions were universal across agency owners:
| Question | Why It's Hard to Answer |
|---|---|
| Are we making money on clients and projects? | Data spread across multiple tools |
| Is our team busy enough? | No clear utilization metrics |
| Do we need to hire or fire? | Resource planning disconnected from profitability |
| Are we charging enough? | Pricing not tied to actual delivery costs |
Everyone had the same problem. Nobody had a good solution.
From Product to Service and Back Again
Marcel's path to seven figures wasn't linear. The first version of Parakeeto assumed people had clean, consistent data. It didn't. That version failed.
The second version tried to fix data problems at the source, where people were pricing and estimating work. It got some traction but still wasn't sticky enough to scale.
Both times, Marcel over-engineered solutions based on assumptions. So for version three, he deliberately under-engineered everything. His team had a strict "no real tech" rule for nearly two years. They leaned on off-the-shelf solutions and kept things nimble.
The result? Parakeeto scaled to $1 million in annual recurring revenue on top of Google Sheets, app scripts, and custom functions. Only then did they start building legitimate infrastructure and writing real code.
It was painful. It had limitations. But it let them iterate toward product-market fit way faster than if they'd been maintaining complex infrastructure.
The Tech Stack Today
| Component | Technology | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Legacy systems | Google Sheets, JavaScript (appscripts) | Clients like it, works well for many use cases |
| New infrastructure | TypeScript, React, Postgres | Scalability, performance, speed, security |
| The human layer | Consulting team | Everything they don't have a product for yet |
That human layer is critical. Parakeeto's team handles things like pulling CSV exports from the billions of time-tracking tools that exist, designing data schemas with clients, finding and fixing data hygiene issues, and coaching clients on how to interpret their metrics.
Marcel asked himself: "What would the best and most complete solution look like if there were no constraints around time or money?" Then he threw people at the gaps the technology couldn't fill yet.
Tech-Enabled Consulting
Parakeeto sits in an interesting space. They're a tech-enabled consulting firm selling professional services that are highly leveraged by proprietary technology. Some revenue looks like SaaS revenue, but the core model is service-based.
This wasn't the original plan. Marcel wanted to build a SaaS company. But that narrow focus cost him years in the early days because it restricted how broadly he thought about customer problems and how to solve them.
His advice now? Start with services. Use them to validate that your process for solving a problem actually works. Figure out all the kinks and edge cases. Then build technology to fill those gaps later.
The Education Problem
Creating a new category sounds great until you realize nobody knows what you do. For years, Parakeeto lost more business than they won because articulating their value was hard. Most people think profitability is an accounting problem, so they look for accountants.
Marcel spent years teaching the market that accounting isn't the problem or the solution. That education happens through multiple channels:
| Channel | Strategy | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Earned Media | Guest on podcasts, share POV, teach frameworks | Speaking engagements, mastermind coaching |
| SEO | Publish expertise on blog, leverage backlinks from earned media | Organic discovery |
| Lead Magnets | Educational content teaching profitability frameworks | Position Parakeeto as the obvious solution |
Paid advertising? Marcel tried it. Never made it work. The challenge is the same as everywhere else: when you're in a new category, there's more nuance required. People need education before they're ready to buy.
Looking back, Marcel wishes he'd started by meeting people where they were and selling them what they thought they wanted. That would have given him the opportunity to give them what they actually needed. He thinks Parakeeto would be much further along today if they'd embraced that approach earlier.
The Three-Ingredient Model
Parakeeto's methodology boils down to three things:
| Ingredient | What It Means | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| The Right Framework | Simple metrics, exact formulas, clear relationships between metrics and business outcomes | You can't improve what you can't measure |
| The Right Data | Clean data from finance, delivery, and sales tools without creating extra work | Garbage in, garbage out |
| The Right Process | Data hygiene, adaptability to change, consistent cadences for critical conversations | Ensures the system works even when things are messy |
These three ingredients lead to consistent clarity. That means confident decision-making, team alignment, and ultimately better results.
Tactically, they bring it all together using an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process that pulls data from multiple sources, cleans it up, and makes it actionable.
The Biggest Mistake
Marcel is candid about what slowed Parakeeto down in the early years. They were too focused on the business model they wanted as entrepreneurs (SaaS) instead of the problems their customers actually had.
That narrow focus created two costly restrictions:
| Restriction | Impact |
|---|---|
| Problem definition | Limited thinking about what problems to solve |
| Solution approach | Limited thinking about how to solve and validate solutions |
They over-engineered based on assumptions. They delayed solving problems because they required themselves to build technology instead of just solving them with services first and building tech later.
Marcel's take now? The MVP for most SaaS companies should be a service. It's one of the best ways to validate that your process actually works and figure out all the edge cases. You learn faster, iterate quicker, and de-risk product development significantly.
Plus, you get used to monetizing the human capital that's inherently needed to build a B2B SaaS company anyway: onboarding, support, customer success, customization. Most SaaS companies do these things for free. When you charge for them, it dramatically changes your unit economics and lets you be way better at them than competitors because they become profit centers instead of cost centers.
What Success Looks Like
Marcel wants people to look back in 20 years and credit Parakeeto for permanently changing how service-based businesses measure and improve their profitability.
He thinks they entered the market during a transition from hourly billing to a much more nuanced and complex operating model. Parakeeto did the work to develop a new way of thinking about the business that handles that complexity in a way conventional wisdom couldn't.
The goal? Make Parakeeto's methodology the de facto best practice for running agencies and professional services firms. Think Agile eclipsing Waterfall in software development, but for profit management.
Seven years in with no direct competitors, Marcel is playing the long game. And judging by the seven-figure revenue and the clients who stick around because they're finally getting clear answers to simple questions, he might just pull it off.
