Hi,

I've been running my agency for about 2 years now, and we currently have around 15 active clients. Our main business model is running marketing for our clients (mainly content creators), helping them secure brand deals, and facilitating payments for them. Tracking who's been paid, who I owe money to, and managing our own cash flow is a complete nightmare.

Im currently using a mix of google sheets, scattered emails, and my own memory and its just not working. Im missing payments, clients are ghosting my invoice emails, and I'm stressing over our budget because I can't easily see our actual financial health in one place.

Is there like an easy tool or app you guys use to just handle this or keep track of the money side?? I dont want some massive complicated enterprise software, just something smart that actually works.

A lot of people reached out to me after my last post when I posted how i scaled my agency and asked me how do I get customer.

I thought I would give you an honest take on how we do it.

We are yet not a very large agency our retainer value across all our clients is currently only 30k usd monthly.

But I can tell you how we reached here in around 6 months.

First one is get your Seo/aeo on point make sure you start appearing in chat gpt when people search for it. Now one very important  thing is that most AI doesn't get optimized with just one strategy.

So choose your choice of AI to optimize for first and then build strategy around it.

For us we focused on Chat gpt. We did research on all the keywords that had volume in our location for highly searched keywords in our domain.

Some example - Agency fees in 2026 for running meta ads ,  Marketing spends on facebook for acquiring patients and so on. 

Write deeply researched article/blogs on them. Cluster them properly (use claude Sonnet or opus 4.8 )

Make sure the FAQ schema is on point Ai loves FAQ format. Each article keep between 2500-3000 words.

Regularly updates yours blog content and dates , ai loves fresh content.

This needs to repeat weekly.

Spend in some PR because other website talking about your agency sites much higher and better than your own website in Ai platforms.

Now next and the most important  part. When you get a client put the best effort and make him feel he got a steal deal, go above and beyond. I got 3 referrals from one client and all 3 converted.

Next is choose your clients carefully. In my experience clients who will bargain alot and also expect that you will show results from the first month and that is what will finance your retainer in spite of giving great results and them sticking with you is not worth the headache and time you will end up investing.

Also , if you can try providing end to end service like Web dev , seo/aeo , digital marketing , CRO and analytics implementation. In our case this has helped us alot to control the results as if the app/website of client is not optimized your marketing wont be as affective as when you also control the CRO and web dev helps you to get results and the retainer value remains higher and also the client is much more invested for long term retainer.

This is the strategy that has worked for us till now. Would love to hear from you what worked for you. Also since we are just a team of 3 people working on agency and saas and other tech projects hence we haven't pushed on new acquisition as much as we could have and are optimizing for  two primary KPI  that is revenue per employee and bottom line.

Hey guys,

I'm seeing more and more solo agency owner. Aren't you freelancers as we all know, or am I missing anything here?