Client results

Eight agencies, and what each of them got. Clients stay unnamed at their request, and the numbers are theirs.

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Pipeline

A $600,000 revenue gap cut to $350,000

A branding and creative agency. Consulting engagement.

Sales forecast

from $30Kto $250K

The agency's sales forecast increased 733% in 30 days.

A branding and creative agency came to us with a $600,000 hole between where revenue was heading and where it needed to be. Partway through the work, the founder crossed it out on a call:

“you can put a strike through on 600 and put $350k. Because we’ve already chopped away at that.”

Money was tight and new work had stalled at the same time. Deals lived in notes and an email tool, and the pitch changed depending on who was asking.

We interviewed six of the agency’s own clients about what they buy and why, rebuilt how the agency describes what it sells around those answers, and set up one place where every deal is tracked from first call to signed contract.

Six new clients in a year, and none of them came from a referral

A founder-led agency.

An agency owner had grown the whole business on referrals, and then the referrals slowed down. There was no list and no outreach, and the next project always arrived by luck. Referrals had felt free for years, which is what made the slowdown hard to see coming.

We built a simple weekly rhythm around the people they already had relationships with, starting with past clients and former colleagues who trusted the work. Within a year they had signed six clients no referral would have brought them.

Six clients in a year was the difference between waiting for the phone to ring and knowing where the next conversation was coming from.

Pricing

Average retainer value doubled in two quarters, without losing a client

A brand agency.

Average retainer value

from 1xto 2x

Renewals stopped being a negotiation over hours.

An agency owner came to us discounting every renewal just to keep the work. Retainers were priced on hours, so every talk about scope became a fight about price, and the discounts kept getting bigger the longer a client stayed.

We rebuilt the offer into three fixed packages priced on results. Each package named what the client got and what it cost, so a renewal became a choice between packages instead of a negotiation over hours. The discounts had been a habit on both sides, and the packages gave everyone a reason to stop.

The price fights stopped. Within two quarters the average retainer had doubled.

From a $5,000 habit to a $10,000 to $50,000 target, in seven weeks

A boutique branding agency.

Opening project price

from $5Kto $10K

The founder now names the $10,000 to $50,000 range in the first conversation.

Seven weeks in, the founder of a boutique branding agency stopped one of our working sessions.

“I think you’ve been a life changer for us.”

Then came a warning that they had every intention of keeping it going.

The agency had grown as far as referrals would take it. Every new branding conversation opened at $5,000, and new business meant sitting down in a rough month and calling people.

In the first weeks, the founder picked one kind of client to focus on. For those projects the founder now asks for $10,000 to $50,000 instead of $5,000, says the range in the first conversation, and sits down with the client to work out what the project will include and what it will cost. And we made a list of the two dozen past clients most likely to hire again soon, put it in order, and set a schedule for working through it.

The first person contacted from that list replied within the hour and had already been thinking about reaching out. They’re talking budget now.

Positioning

A new target list led to a meeting with one of the world's largest tech companies

A creative production company. Advisory engagement.

A creative production company grew for years on referrals and reputation, and then the growth stopped. Weeks after we built them a list of companies to go after, the firm booked a meeting with one of the largest technology companies in the world. The founder told us where the meeting came from: “the list that you provided.”

We started by interviewing five of the people who hire firms like theirs, and not one of the five knew the firm offered one of its existing services. We rebuilt the service lineup around that and renamed each service in the buyers’ own words.

The finished list held nearly 700 companies, built inside the tools the firm already used. Some were companies showing signs they were ready to buy. The rest were companies where a warm relationship already existed. The founders worked the list themselves.

If one of these sounds like your firm, come talk it through.

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Growth leaks

One unbilled habit was costing the agency $40,000+ a year

A creative agency.

A creative agency asked us why profit kept shrinking while revenue held steady. We walked through their last dozen projects and found the same leak in almost every one: small client requests handled free because the team wanted to avoid an awkward conversation. That habit cost the agency $40,000+ a year.

None of the requests looked expensive on their own. A revised banner here, another round of edits there. The cost only became visible across a year of them, and the fix cost almost nothing to run.

They added a change-request step and clients kept saying yes. The margin came back.

Their first launch came in under budget, with zero change orders

A digital agency. Ongoing Advisory engagement.

Web projects at a digital agency kept running past their budgets. They brought us in to change that. The newest launch came in under budget with no change orders.

The project lead walked through why on our call. Scope had been defined together with the client at the start, down to which work the client would handle themselves, like loading their own content. The project was “scoped fine” because the agency had been “very clear with them at the beginning of the project” about what was included. That setup is what we had been working on together.

They signed a three-month project. A year and a half later, the engagement is still running.

Marketing

Marketing stopped being the owner's midnight job, and the inbound leads followed

A design studio. Fractional marketing engagement.

The owner of a design studio was doing all the marketing personally, which meant it happened in bursts and then stopped for months. We picked it up and set a plan with a schedule the team could actually keep. The pipeline finally had one owner and a process behind it. The stop-start turned into a steady rhythm.

Bursts are what marketing looks like when it belongs to the busiest person in the building. A strong month when client work was quiet, then nothing for a stretch.

Within a quarter the studio had five inbound conversations it would never have had, and the owner got their evenings back.

Seen your own firm in these stories? The next step is a strategy call.

Thirty minutes on where your agency is and what would have to change.

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