Real Agencies. Real Results.
$700K Digital Marketing Agency
“He had a $1.2M target and no plan to hit it.”
A digital marketing agency owner came to us at $700K. Stressed. Months behind on his books. Payroll anxiety every two weeks. Working constantly — but only on client work, issues, and fires. No time to actually grow.
He had a $1.2M revenue target for the next 12 months. No pipeline. No plan. No financial foundation to build from.
We ran our 90-day onboarding — 90 in 90.
In those 90 days: books caught up and cleaned, financials delivered within 10 days of month-end, receipt capture set up so his only accounting task is a photo on his phone, a financial model built on reality not hope, a pricing audit completed — every proposal was 33–50% below market, and collections tightened from 51 days outstanding to 25 days.
That last one: at $700K revenue, cutting AR days from 51 to 25 freed up $50,000 in cash. Permanently. No new clients. No cost cutting. Just getting paid faster.
He raised his prices 33–50%. He still won the work.
Then we installed the Agency Guardrails — three metrics that told him exactly when the business was ready to hire.
He hit $1.2M. Then kept going. Revenue is now $2.2M — on the same financial structure we installed in those first 90 days.
Monthly close. Monthly review. Three key metrics. That’s it.
Most owners at this stage don’t need a complex financial system. They need a clean one — and someone to show them what the numbers are actually saying.
$1.6M Creative Agency
“His agency looked great on paper. He was miserable.”
$1.6M in revenue. Healthy margins. All three people metrics at or better than target. Ten staff. Nothing obviously broken.
But the owner was exhausted and the business had stopped growing.
The entire team was junior and intermediate. Every deliverable went through him. He was the quality filter, the escalation point, and the senior delivery resource — all at once.
There was a longer-term problem too. A business this dependent on its owner has no external value. He couldn’t sell it. Couldn’t step back. Couldn’t take a week off without the phone ringing.
When we looked at the numbers, something interesting showed up.
His people cost metrics were all performing better than target — not because the business was efficient, but because he was subsidising the team’s output with his own time. That time wasn’t showing up anywhere in the metrics.
He had headroom to hire senior help. He just couldn’t see it.
Over the next 6 months he made two hires: a senior operator to own day-to-day delivery, and a Sales Delivery Manager experienced enough to own client work end-to-end.
Revenue grew to $1.8M. People metrics stayed in range.
Over the following 12 months he added a people lead — someone who actually enjoyed managing staff issues. He stopped dealing with them entirely.
Revenue hit $2.6M. The owner was running his business — not buried in it.
Three hires. People metrics held throughout. 63% revenue growth.
But the real outcome was simpler: he got his energy back.
Low people costs aren’t always a sign of efficiency. Sometimes they’re a sign the owner is filling a gap the business should be paying for.
$3.8M Digital Marketing Agency
“The revenue looked fine. The margin didn't.”
A $3.8M agency had been growing steadily. Team of 20. Consistent clients. Revenue that looked healthy.
But the owner had a feeling the business wasn’t as profitable as the top line suggested. Some months were tighter than they should have been. Nobody could explain why.
When we dug in, three things showed up.
Contractor spend had become structural overhead. Direct labour was fine — but contractor costs had accumulated without anyone tracking them as a percentage of revenue. Total people costs were quietly pushing above 65%. Nobody had flagged it.
Some clients were being served at a loss. No client-level cost accounting meant profitable and unprofitable work looked identical in the P&L. When we allocated delivery costs properly, several long-standing accounts were generating almost no margin.
Compensation had no structure. Salaries had been set deal by deal as the team grew. No job levels. No salary bands. Every hire and raise negotiated from scratch — inconsistent and increasingly hard to defend.
We installed weekly contractor spend monitoring, client-level cost accounting, a pricing model calculator, job levels and salary tiers, and a 13-week rolling cash forecast.
Key moment: one of the agency’s longest-standing clients was running at near-zero margin once delivery costs were properly allocated. It was repriced. The client stayed. Margin improved immediately.
Three leaks. Three fixes. The revenue line didn’t change dramatically. The profitability of that revenue did.
At this size, the problem usually isn’t revenue. It’s that nobody is watching the right numbers.
$6M Creative Agency
“We told a $6M agency they needed to shrink before they grew. They listened.”
When we came on, the agency looked fine from the outside. $6M in revenue. A real team. An established client base.
But the business was carrying weight it didn’t need.
A full-time controller was their entire finance function — expensive, reactive, producing historical reports with no forward visibility and no leadership engagement with the numbers.
Management and admin roles had accumulated through growth years. Staff were busy. But busy and valuable aren’t the same thing.
We made two recommendations that weren’t comfortable: replace the finance function entirely, and restructure the team by removing roles where the work was activity, not value.
In the first 6 months: team headcount dropped 33%, revenue dropped 15% to $5M, and budget ownership with a monthly leadership finance cadence was installed.
Then the business grew back. Deliberately.
At month 24: revenue was $6.5M, staffing was down 10% from the original team with only 50% of removed roles added back, accounting cost was 27% lower than day one with significantly more scope and value, and the CEO was working 4 days per week — no longer the financial bottleneck.
10% revenue growth over 24 months sounds modest. A more profitable business, a leaner team, a CEO with their time back — that’s the real outcome.
Growth isn’t always the answer. Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is get the structure right first.
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Every one of these agencies had a different problem. The common thread was visibility — knowing what the numbers were actually saying and having someone to help act on them.