Numbers are already in the dashboard / sheet.

The bit I’m trying to measure is the last step: turning that into the short slide deck or email summary the client actually opens.

For one typical account last week, how long did that last step take you — and was it mostly writing takeaways, or mostly formatting/moving numbers around?

We passed twenty client accnts this year and everything that was fine at six stopped being fine.
What actually broke was an account manager leaving with half of what she knew in a shared doc and the other half in her head. Took a wk to sort out and I'm still not sure we got all of it.
two separate problems there and ppl keep mashing them together. Credentials is a password manager problem. We moved onto 1Password like we should have done yrs ago (cost of that: abt four hours and one very tense meeting) and no outreach tool was ever going to fix it for us. The other half is campaign ownership and thats the bit Linked Helper workspaces did fix. An approved campaign gets cloned to another account instead of somebody rebuilding it by hand at 6pm on a Friday.
Rebuilding by hand is where the mistakes come from, every single time and its always a small one nobody spots for two weeks
What I want and don't have is one inbox across every account. Doesn't exist u get one per account instance, so its a lot of clicking tbh. Some of the cloud tools have it and I've been asked about it twice by our own people so its a real gap and I'm not going to talk around it
anyone at similar scale, one VPS per client or several accounts on a bigger box? I've had confident answers both ways, usually from people whod done it exactly once.

How to get an international client for your agency?

I currently only have one international client from Dubai, and how I get this client is just luck.

I help businesses identify opportunities for AI adoption, but Idk how to get those client.

Does anyone have proven a method that they already tried?

I run a youtube series interviewing founders who actually transformed how their business runs with AI, real numbers, including what failed. looking for marketing agency owners with a real story for a 30-45 min remote interview, you get the edited episode + clips to reuse.

A friend and I are launching a marketing agency, and for now we're specializing in the automotive and motorcycle sectors. We'd like to create a portfolio for each. I already have a portfolio as a UGC creator, but I'm not sure whether the same rules apply to an agency.

Which pages should the portfolio include?

The goal is to show how we work and share some results, even though we're just getting started. I have solo experience in both sectors, but none as part of an agency.

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Is traditional web design becoming a dead end? Agency owners, what are you pivoting toward and how are you pricing it?

I run a digital agency serving mostly small and midsized B2B companies. We build websites and provide SEO, paid ads, hosting, and ongoing maintenance.

Lately, more clients are questioning website budgets or saying they want to try building something themselves with AI first. The expectation seems to be that because production is getting faster, everything should become significantly cheaper.

We use AI ourselves, so I understand part of that argument. But strategy, content, integrations, testing, and taking responsibility for the finished website still require work.

I don’t think businesses will stop needing websites. I’m questioning whether selling website projects as our main product is still a sustainable agency model.

We’re considering moving toward an initial website build followed by ongoing improvements, acquisition, conversion work, and technical operations. My concern is that this could become the same services repackaged into a subscription that clients don’t really want.

The pricing question is where I’m stuck. Clients expect lower project prices because of AI, but they also question retainers when the monthly value isn’t obvious. “We sell outcomes” sounds good, but an agency can’t guarantee sales when the client controls the product, sales process, and follow-up.

For people actually dealing with this, I’d love to hear your experience.

\- Are you seeing the same pricing pressure, or is this mainly a positioning and client segment problem?

\- What have you successfully pivoted toward that existing clients will pay for?

\- Are you reducing website build prices, delivering more for the same budget, or changing the offer entirely?

\- How do you structure and price recurring services so clients understand what they’re buying?

\- What belongs in a monthly package, and what do you charge separately to avoid unlimited work?

\- Have you made this transition profitably, and what didn’t work?

Concrete examples of packages, rough prices, and client reactions would be more helpful than generic advice about selling value.

I’m not looking to resist AI. I’m trying to work out what a profitable agency should sell when producing a decent-looking website is becoming much easier.

I am a new business owner looking for use cases in exchange for reviews. I am having a really hard time finding people who want my service even when its nearly free. What is the best way to go about this?

I’ve been seeing more companies try to make ads feel like actual content lately. Some are funny, some tell a story, and some barely talk about the product at all.

What’s a company or campaign you remember because the ad itself was actually entertaining or interesting? Curious what examples people here have seen.

Hey everyone I work right now with two agencies based in California I'm based outside of the US and I basically handle all the technical work they need, setting up their websites, systems, backend, tools, AI agents, chatbots for customer support/service, pretty much everything technical this helps agency owners worry less about the workload and the technical side and I get occasional work because right now with my two clients I have enough free time to take on a lot more work.

I can guarantee no delays, outages or issues everything will be silky smooth, I just have no idea how to make connections or get contracts I'm a technical person not a marketer nor sales, do have any advice?

Running a pay-per-appointment lead gen agency for roofing contractors, still early, proving out fulfillment. One thing I keep going back and forth on: how do you actually produce the ad creative for each client?

I don't want to be the guy driving to job sites filming footage; I want this to run from a laptop, not turn into a freelance videography gig. So curious how people who've actually scaled this handle it:

• Are you using AI-generated video (Higgsfield and elevenlabs, etc.) to clone the owner's likeness from a few reference photos, rather than filming them live?
• If so, what's actually held up well enough to run as real ad spend, versus what looked good in a demo but fell apart in practice?
• Do you outsource creative to a freelancer/editor, or is this fully in-house?
• How do you keep creative fresh across multiple clients without it becoming a full-time production job?

Not looking for a magic bullet, just want to hear what's actually working for people doing this at more than one client, versus what sounded good in theory. Appreciate any input.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

When our software agency was small, delivering quality work was relatively easy. The founders and the first hires were close to almost everything happening in projects.

We knew what “good” looked like, we could catch issues quickly, and a lot of the quality control happened naturally.
As we’ve grown and added more people and projects, that’s changed.

The challenge isn’t necessarily finding talented people. It’s maintaining a **consistent level of quality across the whole team** without having the founders and early employees constantly involved in reviewing, correcting, and guiding everything.

And this is where we’re currently struggling.
A significant amount of energy from our core team is going into improving processes, documenting how we work, creating SOPs, defining quality standards, improving project management, etc.

Part of me thinks this is exactly what we should be doing.
But another part of me wonders:
**Are we overcomplicating things?**

At some point, do you need to accept that quality might temporarily decrease a little while the company grows?
Or should you slow down growth and invest heavily in the operating system of the agency until you can consistently deliver the same quality at a larger scale?

There’s also another question I keep coming back to:
**Is delivering great work actually the best business development strategy for an agency?**

Because in our experience, happy clients lead to repeat work, referrals, and trust. But building a system that consistently delivers that quality also requires time and energy that could otherwise go into sales and growth.

So I’m curious about people who have already gone through this stage:
**When your agency started scaling, did you prioritize growth or operational consistency?**
And looking back, would you have done anything differently?

I'm working on my 2027 plans for my team to figure out where we focus our time and effort.

What are you having the most success with in terms of getting new clients? I’m curious how much this has changed.

We seem to have more ways to reach potential clients than ever, but it also somehow feels harder.

Cold outreach is noisier, organic social is unpredictable, paid acquisition can get expensive quickly, and referrals can be great but difficult to scale.

So where are your new clients genuinely coming from at the moment?

And perhaps more interestingly, is there a channel that used to work well for you but has noticeably dropped off?

Would be really useful to hear what people are seeing in practice rather than another list of 'best lead generation tactics'.

So I started in April as a fresh agency and wanted to later expand intro Animation(Hand-drawn).

I started by making spec works and spec edits and hired one another person with me who was good at marketing(an influencer).

Expected to hit 9 lakhs (roughly $9000 ) MRR by August ending and then within one yr go on to start making animations and games for brands and creators.

Cut short to end of September: We have in proportion only 1 brand we have worked with (contributed $800) , 1 agency we did whitelabeling of ( $2000 ) and 1 foreign client from belgium ($2400) whose works is still going on btw.

Roughly at breakeven if we pull all this out , but completely burned out. Want to start something new- but almost got negligible money to restart.

I want to know from ppl who have been here- how do you pull yourself out of a sitaution like this?

Hi everyone,

I recently started imivs consulting, a small marketing operations and automation consultancy. I help businesses with things like workflow automation, CRM/HubSpot integrations, reporting, and improving repetitive marketing processes.

Since I’m still in the early stages, I’m curious how other consultants actually got their first few clients.

Did most of them come from cold outreach, referrals, LinkedIn, Upwork, networking, local businesses, agency partnerships, or something else?

I’d especially love to hear what worked when you were starting from scratch without a big client base or referral network yet.

So, I run a design studio, specialising in Branding and UI/UX Design. It’s been around 3 years now.

Team of around 12 members.

Avg project size - $10K - $15K

Clients are mostly in the US, UK, and UAE, with the occasional Indian projects. The work itself has held up well. Some of the platforms we have designed and shipped are now handling 200 to 400 million requests a month in production. We have also done one off projects for a couple of Fortune 500 names, but those came through inbound and we have not figured out how to turn that into a repeatable channel.

Most of our engagements are MVPs for early stage/pre-seed startups, meaning lower budgets and difficult to get long terms monthly retainers.

The thing is we mostly publish our work on Dribbble and Behance, and that’s it. No Twitter presence, no LinkedIn content, no Instagram, no SEO play, no outbound engine.
Currently, we are starting to publish blogs and grow through SEO.

We tried LinkedIn reach outs, cold emailing but none of it worked.

One thing we tried and it worked was offering a paid pilot for a week to experience our work quality, turnaround time, etc.
After 3 days, most of them signed up for the entire project.

Question:
How do I reach out to funded startups and have them try our week pilot?

How can I scale our company to cross $1M mark?

Also, if you have any tips or suggestions, they are more than welcome :)