r/agency

My agency already has 20 clients after launching just 3 months ago, but I’m still the Strategist and still handling almost everything myself.

I’m honestly having a hard time letting go because what if the person who replaces me won’t be as good as I am? What if we lose clients because of that?

I really want to scale this agency to 100 to 200+ clients, but I feel like I’m also the one slowing down the growth.

For context, I already created a 100+ page SOP document covering how I approach everything. I’m just not sure if it’ll actually work once my first key hire tries to replicate my strategic thinking and workflow.

Would love to hear your thoughts, especially from agency owners who’ve gone through this stage.

Hey party people. Does anyone here go to marketing conferences? Non industry specific, but either conferences for marketing people or for specific marketing tools. Either way, why? I saw some agencies post about going to Canva Create.

When we run ads 99% of the time clients who do listen to us to make some content outperform the guys who don't. Have we just been lucky or did you notice it to?

Problem is to get them to record videos and post them regularly, you just go ahead tell em "We need you to shoot video of you with patients, this n that"

They're resisting to it like cats to water.

We've tried to first hint them what content to make, then we tried researching competitors content in the area, on ads library and that worked much better but its so time consuming to keep updated on all the content trends I doubt its worth the time

What would you use as a lever to just force them to it. Threaten to drop them? Tell them to do their own research and follow trends so its off our shoulders?

Keep in mind we're just getting paid for ads and strategy NOT content. Sadly enough Content is what seems to improve trust and ads performance

Been building a tool internally for our own cold outreach and wondering if anyone else would actually want access to this.

The workflow is basically:

• enter a niche
• optionally add a city, state, region or country
• pull business leads
• verify emails automatically
• export to CSV / Google Sheets
• optionally push directly into Instantly or Smartlead

Originally built it because I was sick of the constant:
scrape → clean → verify → export → import routine every single day.

Not trying to build some giant “AI sales platform”. Honestly just wanted something that made prospecting and campaign setup faster and less painful.

We’ve been using it internally for our own outbound campaigns and it’s become one of those tools where you realise how much time you used to waste before.

Thinking about opening a small beta if there’s genuine interest.

Would anyone here actually pay for something like this or am I solving a very specific “me problem”?

Happy to show screenshots or a quick demo if people are interested.

Hey, this is post 2/2 here, the other one was more about outreach questions for our agency, this one will be more business related.

Not the first time I ask for help here and always got good advice from you guys, so looking forward.

Introduction:
I M23 and my brother M31 have a Conversion rate optimization agency. Our clients always stay at least 12 months if the fit is right. We also have an 60-75% close rate once the person had a call with us, so offer isn't the problem either.
My job is to do all the client fulfillment, so my brother can do the work that brings the agency forward in general. Like: In what direction to go, where to optimize....

We didn't got a new client for 8 months, which is a problem, as many clients get to the end of their lifetime which we also feel in the relationship with them. Then of course the whole AI topic gets bigger and bigger everyday.

We basically analyzed the AI situation for our niche and I want to ask you what you think of it.

So generally speaking, manual coding was wiped out in the last year, that's why we fired all of our developers (2) and I do everything now. Good that our value isn't just coding but our understanding of marketing + Website, basically just sales psychology for e-commerce.

But AI is also taking that away more and more. The work of analyzing data was also wiped out as any tool now has their own analyzing tools. But this is still not very accurate, Ai is talking 40% shit and the other 60% are good advice. But when we talk about complex connections it's still shit.

So for smaller stores, everything less than 1m gross sales, I do think that AI is good enough for you, to not need someone looking at your store. But for everything above, you still need a brain behind analyzing and building structures.

Even if not, an ecom founder still doesn't have the time to do it, or they just want someone to lay off the responsibility. So I don't believe that AI is really taking away our job completely. I think as always, it just gets harder to find clients but I don't believe that this will fall off generally speaking.

We believe that AI is a kind of bubble, just that at one point people (in business) will get a tired and want to go back to people doing some kind of work and not just AI. Bubble is maybe the wrong word but I hope you get what I mean.

We are currently thinking of, how to restructure our agency and until which point to implement AI in our service but also just client work. Is mentioning AI still helping selling your service? I mean there was a time where just mentioning that you use AI was a huge selling point.

Generally what do you think about everything I wrote down here and which steps would you take next?

One thing I’ve noticed watching companies try to fix revenue problems:

They almost always start by blaming strategy, marketing, pricing, outbound volume, territory design, etc.

But sometimes the biggest issue is simply hiring people who sound experienced instead of people who have consistently performed.

Saw this happen with a founder recently. Good product, strong market, decent inbound demand — but they kept hiring salespeople based on interviews and resumes.

On paper everyone looked great.

Then the results never showed up.

What eventually changed was shifting the focus entirely to historical performance:

• Did they actually exceed quota?
• Were they promoted?
• Did they perform across multiple environments?
• Were they trusted with larger accounts?
• Did former leaders want to hire them again?

Another interesting thing: many of the strongest candidates weren’t unemployed or actively searching.

They were already doing well somewhere else. They just happened to be open to more growth, better leadership, or a bigger opportunity.

Feels like a lot of hiring misses happen because companies optimize for availability instead of proven performance.

Hey fellow agency founders, hope your week had a great start!

We're a growth marketing agency with a core focus on performance marketing. This year, as part of the lead generation plan, we've started to focus on improving the website overall while also launching "academy" blog posts as part of the content and discovery plan.

I have been working on this for about a month only but we're starting to see our pages resulting on the first SERP for multiple queries, both long and medium tail keywords. But these clicks don't yet generate leads and lead generation is our primary objective right now.

I'm okay if this effort doesn't bear immediate/short term results but I wanna hear what are the thoughts of other agency founders here who took the time to invest in SEO rather than pure outbound.

Hey guys,

not the first time I post here and always got good feedback, so looking forward to your opinion/help.

Introduction:
I M23 run an agency with my brother M31, last year was our best one where we nearly surpassed the 200k gross income. Which we also only achieved because of a partnership with an Ecom-Growth Mastermind group. we ended the partnership ourselves last month because of various business hurting reasons.
We have an A/B testing agency for Shopify Ecom stores only.

Our main problem ALWAYS was client acquisition. As soon as the client gets into a meeting with us we have a 60-75% close rate and the clients stay at least a year when the fit is right.
So our service/offer isn't the problem.

Now we hired a Cold Mail agency to run our outreach because we are filled with client work, more or less. We are now into week 2 of sending Emails and got 3 positive replies which resulted in 2 calls. Until now, no Client or answer after the call, stores were a perfect fit. So Cold Email isn't dead for our Niche.

The goal is that I do all the client fulfillment and my brother brings the agency forward in all possible ways.

My brother is currently still helping with client fulfillment because Im still learning, before my job was doing the outreach etc, which we outsourced to the agency. So this is sth I have to improve in.

We are looking for a new Client acquisition channel and agreed to following system:
Gathering a small list with perfect fits, maybe 20/30 stores/contacts. They also need to have a more or less active Linkedin account. Than we contact them through Email & Linkedin, with a recorded Loom video attached, going through the store listing main conversion problems...

We want to contact the owner and other employees until we get a clear NO. In this time we recycle the video to upload on all Social Media platforms, short form content on Linkedin, Insta, Youtube.. When we get the final "not interested" we can upload the full video to YT.

Basically splitting up the main video in smaller short form content so we have content for Instagram and YT, to reach more people and finally start some organic inbound efforts.

Let me know what you think of this.

This is Post 1/2, in the other one I will rather ask more business related questions and not outreach.

ok so I keep seeing this on agency books and it kind of drives me nuts. spent years on the consulting side before going independent on pricing, and the pattern is always the same.

retainer margin is at 18 to 22 percent. owner runs the numbers, freaks out, decides the fix is to jack up rates. six months later, theyve lost 30 percent of clients and the rest are grumbling at every change order. wash, rinse, repeat.

heres the thing though. that diagnosis is almost always wrong. below 25 percent retainer margin is rarely a pricing problem, its a discovery problem.

heres the actual math. retainers price for an assumed scope. discovery defines that scope. if discovery is rushed (and it always is for repeat clients, you know each other, you figure it out as you go), the actual work drifts 20 to 40 percent above what was priced within 90 days.

real example I looked at last year, webdev agency in DACH. retainer was 40 hours per month at 4500 €, priced at 75 percent utilization, so 30 billable hours expected. month 3 actual delivery? 47 hours. of those 47, only 32 were in the SOW. other 15 were small stuff. quick fixes, small changes, while youre in there can you also do X. margin collapsed from projected 28 percent to actual 11 percent.

owner saw 11 and said yeah we need higher rates. but raising rates wouldnt have fixed it. the 15 hours of out of scope work would still happen. discovery is where this actually gets fixed.

so what actually fixes this in practice?

-tighter discovery upfront, even for retainer renewals. 90 minute scope review call once a quarter. document current delivery against original SOW. drift is usually obvious once you write it down. most agencies skip this because they trust the relationship.

-change order discipline. anything outside documented scope is a paid change order. agencies underestimate how much margin they give away by saying yes to small requests. 15 hours of small stuff per month is two days of unpaid work, every month.

-and discovery as its own paid product. real upsell sits before the retainer. sell paid discovery at 3 to 5k EUR. it qualifies the buyer (anyone willing to pay for discovery is serious) and it surfaces scope before the retainer even starts.

raising prices on a broken pricing model just compresses retention. retainer math itself is usually fine. what needs fixing happens after signing.

if your margin sits below 25 percent, run this audit before adjusting anything. take your last 5 retainer projects, list everything you actually delivered against everything in the original SOW. the gap is the real reason your margin is dying.

We have most success with SEO, partnerships.

We tried cold calls in 2024 it was fun but didn't last long.

How do you guys get clients for your website, smma, ai agencies?

Which channel of acquition have you tried and which ones you prefer AND which ones do you regret you ever tapped into

I will never forget our journey with cold calls where I got threatened with the FBI :D

We're a third of the way into 2026 and I want to know how LinkedIn is holding up for everyone as an actual channel.

A few things I'm seeing on my end:

• Organic reach feels noticeably softer than 12 months ago, even on posts that used to bang
• DMs land less often (more "Accept" without reply, more silent reads)
• The feed is heavier on AI-generated/templated content, which I think is training people to scroll past faster
• Sales Navigator searches surface the same overworked ICP everyone else is hitting

What are you seeing on your end?

1. Is your organic reach up, flat, or down vs. last year?
2. Are you still getting inbound from posts, or has it shifted to DMs / outbound / events / referrals?
3. Anyone closed a real deal from LinkedIn in the last 60 days - what was the path (post → DM, comment → DM, cold connect, etc.)?
4. What format is actually working for you right now. Text posts, carousels, video, newsletters, polls?
5. If you've moved budget/time off LinkedIn, where did it go and is it working better?

Thanks!

https://gravybo.at/

Super rough but working on it. Payload CMS underpinnings but the entire thing is just screwing around with static stuff.

I’ve built and directed so many websites over the years I’ve lost track of what actually matters and at this point I don’t give a shit.

I’ve been building design systems and brands for 30 years and somehow lost the thread. Pushing design systems and it’s finally crystallized with the purse holders and somehow I don’t give a shit. That’s not a good thing.

It’s weird and I don’t like it. Websites were always a side effect of the business. Cobbler‘s children scenario.

Those spheres were FPO until they became almost an entity of themselves.

Yes I use AI and this is issue way before that. I can go way into the weeds on AI with you because I was doing this before you even knew the word GPT.