Pillars of Scaling the Agency Model

PLUS: The life of running a $500,000+ business as a college student

Author

Cashflow Chronicles
March 22, 2024

Hey Cashflowers,

Since freelancing is so popular at the moment, the professional business transition from freelancing is usually turning into an agency.

In other cases, a freelancing skill can be turned into a SaaS, but most of the time, agencies are the way to fill service-based needs best. So, without further explanations, let’s get into it!

Client Acquisition

The first part of freelancing, as well as agencies is bringing in clients. Without clients for a service-based business, you’ll be dead in the water.

Bringing in clients is something that can’t be overlooked on any channel. Whether that’s through organic social media, cold email, cold DM, etc…

If any agency knows how to bring in clients, they will never be out of business.

The easiest way to do this is through organic, but obviously, you’ll never be able to instantly, or rely on it to be perfect all the time.

The most reliable way to bring in clients is to be talented at ads or some form of cold outreach, such as email or calling.

Going into the details of being great at cold outreach would take centuries, but understand that having a great cold outreach system is essential to running a successful agency.

Systems

Systems are essential in agencies because of how many people you can potentially hire, and how many different channels the agency can develop.

If you have marketing channels, cold outreach channels, actual client work, and communications, a system to help every sector communicate is essential.

Think of this system as a Notion that is interlinked between every system, or a slack channel for communication.

Systems also cover how new employees are trained, or systems for how work is done, reviewed, and sent to clients, depending on how your agency could be integrated with your client.

The more systems are in place, the smoother things can run, but that’s not something that rules.

If you focus too much on optimizing before doing the actual work and having enough clients to be busy, you’ll be wasting your time.

Integrate systems where you see them making an improvement, not just because there could be a system.

Managing

One of the biggest changes between freelancing and turning your gig into an agency is the difference between doing the work and managing your agency to do the work.

See when you’re freelancing you’ll be doing all the work, taking all the calls, talking to every client, etc…

When you’re running an agency you have to understand you’re managing the agency, not doing it yourself.

VAs will be taking calls, writers will be writing copy, outreachers will be bringing in clients, appointment setters will be setting all calls, etc…

Your job running the agency isn’t to do any of this work, but to make sure that everyone is doing their job and things are running smoothly, aka running the agency, not working within the agency.

-Cheers!

Cashflow Chronicles

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