Let me take you back to the end of 2016. I’d been building my lead generation agency — first called Hire Gun, then rebranded to Credto after a cease and desist two months in — and things had taken off fast. From September to December that year, I went from $8,300/month to $18,000/month. That sounds great. It wasn’t.
Demand was off the charts. I was turning away clients. Technology was failing. I had a hard cap on how many clients I could deliver for, and I’d hit it. I’d caught a tiger by the tail, and it wasn’t doing me any good. I was stuck.
If you’re in that $15–20K/month range right now — or you’ve hit a ceiling somewhere around $250K/year — this is exactly what I did to break through it, and what I take every client through when they hit the same wall.
There are two things you need to do: get time back, and get profit back. They feed each other. Here’s how.
The Agency Growth Flywheel
Think of agency growth like a video game. The first boss is getting to $100K/year. The second boss — the one most people don’t expect to be hard — is getting past $250K. Each time you beat a boss, you know what to do when you face them again. But the first time, you don’t, and you’re going to take some hits.
The trap at this stage is thinking you need more leads. You might, but if you don’t have time to talk to them, close them, or onboard them, more leads just create more chaos. You can’t grow into more pain when you’re already maxed out.
The flywheel starts here: get time back → raise prices → get profit → hire → free up more time → invest in marketing and sales. Once it starts spinning, everything compounds. Let’s start it spinning.
Step 1: Do a Time Audit
When I hired my first coach, Andy, the first thing we did was audit my time. We went through the previous two weeks in 30-minute increments and looked at every single thing I was spending time on. For each task, we rated two things on a 0–4 scale:
- Value to the business — how much does this actually move things forward?
- Energy it gives you — does this fill your tank or drain it?
Why two weeks? A single week can be misleading — a sick kid, a business trip, an unusual project can skew everything. Two weeks averages out to something real.
Once you have the data, sort it. What comes out the other end is a clear picture of where your time is actually going versus where it should go.
What to do with the results
First, eliminate. There are things you’re doing that don’t need to be done at all. Cut them. You can probably recover half a day a week just from this step, which is enormous if you currently have zero margin.
Then, identify what to delegate. Look for the tasks that are low-leverage and drain your energy — those are your first hires. You don’t need to hire immediately, but start building the picture of what a VA, an EA, or even an AI tool could take off your plate. The goal is to shift your time from low-value tasks to high-value ones, and hire into that gap.
Of course, hiring is hard when you don’t have profit. Which is why the next step matters so much.
Step 2: Raise Your Rates
Here’s a principle I came across from a conversation Alex Hormozi recounted: when demand is high, cut supply. It sounds counterintuitive. But it’s just math.
Ask yourself this: if you doubled your prices, would you lose half your clients?
If the answer is no — and for most agencies, the honest answer is no — then doubling your prices is mathematically the right move. Here’s the simple version:
- 10 clients at $10K/month = $100K/month
- You double rates to $20K/month and lose 3 clients
- 7 clients × $20K = $140K/month
You’re making $40K more per month. And you have the time you were spending on those three departed clients freed up for marketing, sales, or just having a life. The conversations won’t always be fun. You will lose some clients. It won’t feel great. Do it anyway.
Stop pricing your time. Start pricing your value.
The other mistake I see constantly is agencies pricing based on what their time is worth instead of what the outcome is worth to the client.
Here’s the math people do: “I want to make $300K/year. I’ll bill 30 hours a week for 40 weeks. That’s 1,200 hours. So I need to charge $250/hour.” That covers your costs, but it doesn’t get you ahead.
Now consider this: if the work you do generates a client an extra $1M in revenue, and they’re happy to pay $100,000 for that outcome — why are you charging them $25,000 because it only took you 100 hours? They’re getting an incredible deal. You’re leaving $75,000 on the table.
Charge what the work is worth to the person receiving it, not what your time costs you. Value scales. Time doesn’t.
At Credto, I raised rates 10–17x over the course of the business. When I first started working with my coach, our bottom offer was $100/month. By the time I sold the business, our minimum was $1,700/month and our top was $4,999/month — plus commission on deals the agencies closed. Some clients were paying us $100K/year, up from $6K. The business model had transformed entirely.
People also value expensive things more. When you’re priced at a premium, you attract clients who take the work seriously, implement your recommendations, and get better results. That’s the client you want to work with. Being oversubscribed and premium isn’t just good for your bank account — it’s better for your clients too.
Time + Profit = The Way Out
These two moves — auditing your time and raising your rates — feed directly into each other. More profit gives you the cash to hire, which gives you more time. More time lets you actually do marketing and sales. More marketing and sales builds pipeline. Pipeline gives you the confidence to raise prices further and be selective about who you work with.
That’s the flywheel. Once it starts spinning, the business grows differently. You stop feeling stuck. You stop working nights and weekends just to stay flat. You start getting ahead.
I haven’t worked more than 30 hours a week in many years. That didn’t happen by accident. It started with a time audit and a rate increase at exactly this stage.
If you’re stuck and want help working through this in your own business, schedule a strategy session with me. My goal is to get you to $500K/year in revenue — with margin and time to actually enjoy it.
Watch the original video: How to get your $250k/yr agency unstuck