BeHuman is a performance creative agency based in Hull, UK. They produce high-volume ad creative for rapidly-growing DTC and consumer brands across Meta, TikTok, and beyond.

The starting point: a workflow fragmented across 5 different tools

Every creative agency has their version of the same problem. Briefs in one place. Reviews in another. Assets scattered across Drive folders with names that made sense at the time. Client feedback arriving via email, then Slack, then email again.

For Josh Hedges, founder of creative agency BeHuman, that version looked like this: ClickUp for project management and invoice tracking. Frame.io for client reviews. Notion and Figma for briefs and documentation.

Every new batch of creative meant sending clients a Frame link, waiting for them to find it, navigate to it, leave their feedback somewhere, and somehow get that back into the workflow.

Five separate tools, with five sets of logins meant there were five separate places for something to fall through the cracks, and for crucial context to get lost in one tool over the other.

From start to finish, delivering a batch of creatives took around five weeks, which wasn't bad, but certainly left room for improvement.

Moving everything into one place

BeHuman started migrating to Focal in July 2025. Within a month, every other tool in their stack was gone and everything was done in Focal.

The way Josh and the team set it up: 

• They built one master board covering all clients, with additional per-client views to show only what's relevant to each one. 
• Briefs, internal review, client revision and final delivery were all tracked in the same board, with statuses that move assets through each stage. 
• In addition to internal work moving to Focal, the same was also done for client reviews. Clients now log directly into Focal to review and approve. No more Frame links or logging in and out of separate accounts.

"We've got rid of every other piece of software that we used."

— Josh Hedges, Founder, BeHuman

The consolidation went further than creative production. BeHuman also moved their SOP library into Focal. It was all video-based, so team members can find and watch training materials in the same place they do their work. Invoicing and payment tracking followed. Then came talent booking and resource management.

"Focal actually achieves what used to take 5 tools before. We have the same things: creative tasks, team tasks, payments, and even our SOP library inside a single platform."

For clients without their own Focal account, BeHuman uses Google Drive automation to push approved assets on export. Folder structures are named by cycle ID and assets get naming conventions applied automatically. There’s no more need for any manual downloads or re-uploads.

"It's so much easier to track where things are, the stage every deliverable and project is at. It's a massive upgrade from where we were in terms of the tech stack that we had."

The results: double the monthly revenue, brief to delivery 60% faster

The business benefits for BeHuman were considerable. Within one month from shifting to Focal, they were able to drop the average delivery time from briefing to live ad from five weeks to two weeks.

Thanks to the added efficiency, they were also able to deliver more assets to customers, while simultaneously onboarding new ones more efficiently, which led to monthly revenue effectively doubling. The consolidation also had the added benefit of reducing software costs by ~50%.

"We went from a five week turnaround average to two weeks within a month of switching to Focal."

— Josh Hedges, Founder, BeHuman

The client experience changed too. Where clients used to navigate to a Frame link, hunt for the right batch, and leave feedback somewhere that had to be manually tracked, they now log into Focal and everything is waiting for them. Assets are easy to see and find, and comments can be left precisely on a per asset, and even frame-by-frame basis.

"Feedback has predominantly been that clients are happy that everything is always in the same place. They don't ever need to find a link or go back anywhere. They just log into Focal and everything is ready for them to review."

The response from new clients has been great as well. BeHuman now pitches Focal's visibility as part of their agency offer. They show brands exactly how a creative goes from brief to launch inside the platform. After one such demo, one of their customers immediately booked a call with Focal to get their own account.

"We love the platform and the results we can achieve with it are genuinely impressive. Everyone doing creative work should use Focal."

What this means for creative agencies

BeHuman is a great case study for what a Focal-native creative agency looks like. Not a brand managing a single creative library, but an agency running its entire operation with multiple clients, internal review, client delivery, training, and even financial tracking from a single workspace.

The fundamental business impact is direct: faster delivery means faster billing cycles. Fewer tools means less overhead and software costs. Clients who can see their creative pipeline from brief to launch are easier to retain.

"The faster we deliver, the faster we get paid again to make more. And Focal is how we condense that time frame down."

‍