Most agency owners trying to grow make the same mistake: they focus on getting more leads before they’ve fixed the foundation underneath. Pour water into a leaky bucket and it doesn’t matter how fast you pour — it’s going right out the other end. You end up spending more on marketing just to stay flat.
Over the last 10 years, I’ve built four multiple six-figure service businesses — a consultancy, two agencies, and now my coaching business. Through that experience, I’ve developed a 12-step process that I take every client through. The key insight: the right activity at the wrong time is the wrong activity. We identify which of these 12 steps you don’t have in place yet, and those are exactly where we focus.
Here’s the full framework, in order.
Step 1: Gather Your Data
I’m consistently amazed at how many agencies doing $20–30K/month have zero data on their business. They can’t tell me how many leads they’re getting, how many proposals they’re sending, what their close rate is, how much new revenue is coming in, or how much is churning out each month.
Before I do anything else with a new client, I give them homework: gather the data. Between our intro call and our first strategy session, they pull together their numbers. Every single time, something interesting surfaces — a pattern they hadn’t noticed, a number that surprises them. Get your data in place first. Everything else depends on it.
Step 2: Fix Cash Flow
Most agencies have billing all over the place — one client on the 7th, another on the 28th, some net 30, some net 40, some paying in advance. That chaos creates stress and makes it hard to run your business predictably.
We clean this up so you’re getting paid more consistently, eliminating invoicing mistakes, and making sure cash arrives when you need it. This one change alone removes a significant amount of stress — and makes investing in growth feel a lot less risky.
Step 3: Identify Your ICP
When agencies are starting out, they take whoever will pay them. E-commerce, SaaS, local businesses — anything. That’s fine early on. But at some point, you need to get specific.
Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is the intersection of: who you enjoy working with, who you get the best results for, and what those projects actually look like. Once you identify it, everything gets easier — your messaging, your outreach, your close rate, your fulfillment. Specificity is a superpower.
Step 4: Fix Your Offer
A great offer doesn’t need to be sold — people buy it. A weak offer requires you to overcome objections, discount, and convince. Most agency offers are scattered: a little of this, a little of that, whatever the client asked for last week.
We tighten the offer around what you do best, for whom, and with what outcome. My first agency, Credito, was a lead generation agency and we were sold out for years — not because of amazing marketing, but because the offer was so strong that people just said yes. The results were insane, the cost made sense, and we reduced risk and time-to-value to near zero. That’s what a good offer does.
Step 5: Fix Your Packaging
Once you know your ICP and offer, you can package it in a way that makes sense to buyers. The structure I usually land on:
- A smaller entry-level package
- A mid-tier package (where most clients land)
- A high-volume or premium package — essentially more of #2, with a couple of additions
Clear packaging makes selling easier and gives you room to charge more. When someone can see exactly what they’re getting and why the price makes sense, the conversation changes entirely.
Step 6: Fix Your Pricing
Most agencies price based on hours and cost-plus: figure out what you want to make, add a multiplier for profit. It works well enough to survive, but it keeps margins low and makes it really hard to grow.
The shift is to price to value. If you know you can generate a client an additional million dollars over the next year, and they should reasonably spend 10% of that on marketing, you now have a very different pricing conversation. You’re charging for outcomes, not hours. And value scales in ways that time simply doesn’t.
Step 7: Get Contracts in Place
Too many agencies either don’t have contracts at all, or they’re signing whatever the client sends them. As you formalize your business, you need agreements that protect you — not just the client.
The timing here is perfect: you’ve just reworked your offer and pricing, so going back to existing clients to “formalize things” is a natural and easy conversation. For contracts you’re sending, get a lawyer to review them ahead of time. For client paper, I have a threshold — under a certain deal size, I don’t mark up their contract. But if you’re selling high-ticket, make sure you have good legal backing.
Step 8: Fix Your Sales Process
At this point you have a refined ICP, a strong offer, clear packaging, value-based pricing, and contracts. Your sales process needs to reflect all of that — it’s a different conversation than the one you were having before.
I walk my clients through my DISC sales framework, which addresses most of the common issues. Beyond that, we work through objection handling and process refinements specific to their situation. Edge cases come up — I’m always available async for those via Voxer, email, or Slack.
Step 9: Delegate Admin
Here’s the one most people don’t expect at this point in the list. Not leads. Not marketing. Delegate your admin.
Invoicing, calendar management, inbox triage, scheduling, reporting — these are tasks you’re doing yourself that you could pay someone significantly less to do. We can typically find 10–15 hours a week through delegation. That time is about to become very valuable, because it’s what you’ll apply to the next step.
Step 10: Pick a Marketing Channel
Now — and only now — we talk about marketing.
We pick one channel. Not five. One. Whether it’s LinkedIn content, YouTube, email, cold outreach, paid ads, or something else — we pick the one you’re going to go deep on and learn completely. You’ll get leads from other places too, through referrals and cross-posting, but this is your primary channel and you’re going to maximize it: content types, formats, ad creative, cadence, all of it.
The channel matters less than the commitment to it. Pick one and go all in.
Step 11: Increase Marketing Volume
When you start seeing results from your channel, the natural instinct is to ease up. Don’t. That’s the moment to double down.
The progression looks like this: do more → plateau → get better → do more again → plateau → get better. Once you’ve maxed out both volume and quality on a channel, then — and only then — do you consider adding a second one. Most agencies never actually hit that ceiling because they move on too early.
Step 12: Hire Help
If you’ve done the previous 11 steps, you’re going to hit capacity. That’s a good problem. Now it’s time to bring in help — but not before.
The sequence I typically see: start with fractional help, move to part-time, eventually move to full-time with contractors as needed. Hiring too early — before your offer, pricing, and sales process are dialed in — is one of the most expensive mistakes an agency owner can make. Get the foundation right first.
The Bottom Line
These 12 steps are the difference between an agency that struggles to grow and one that doubles — typically from $15–20K/month to $30–50K/month — within about 12 months. Agencies don’t grow exponentially; they grow in steps. But when you take the right steps in the right order, the compounding effect is real.
The question isn’t whether these steps work. It’s which ones you’re missing. That’s where we start.
If you’re a digital agency owner who’s stuck or not growing as fast as you want to, schedule a strategy session with me. We’ll figure out exactly where you are in this framework and what to focus on first.
Watch the original video: 12 Steps to Doubling Your Agency