First agency I sold, second agency I’m building better this time - 3 month update

Hi everyone,

My name is Andy, 27, from London.

As a quick up-to-date 2 years ago I sold my Unlimited design agency (pixeltrue.com) after growing it to $50k/month with a full-time team of 16.

2 Years later I’ve started the journey to growing my second agency, Flowspark, an Unlimited Webflow Development agency (flowspark.co) to $20k/month. Each month I’ll be sending an update of the progress so far and lessons learnt as a second-time founder.

Current Metrics

Revenue - $7k/month with a team of 3.
Expenses - $3k/month on team salary and software to operate.
Profit - $4k/month (All profits to be re-invested back into the business)

The biggest change in how I'm approaching this business

Focus on delivering a high quality service to your current clients, not chasing new clients.

Agencies are notoriously known for high churn rates (upwards of 20-30% each month). It's why a lot of agency owners are primarily focused on client-acquisition.

I’ve found It’s quite a stressful approach to running an agency - with overhead from a team to deliver the service, and high churn rates, it becomes a constant game of chasing down new clients, your business feels like it’s 2-3 bad months away from shutting down.

For me this is the biggest source of stress that comes from running an agency.

I’ve found a better approach is to spend most of your headspace on delivering an excellent service to your current clients rather than chasing the next client.

That isn’t to say you abandon any sort of marketing, but your priority is to answer the question “how do I provide an exceptional service to my clients”. The ultimate goal from this is to create a business you know that delivers exceptional value - validated by feedback from current clients. To me this is:

• Tight SOPs that re-create excellent service every time - Communication SOPs, performance metrics, company culture (for example at Flowspark I mention High-Quality to our team at least 20 times a week, it’s what we embody)
• Hiring right - this step is essential, if you hire wrong, you’ll be left with tons of headaches (let me know if I should write a post about this)
• Getting in the trenches - You need to be in the trenches during the start to figure out how to provide an exceptional service. Right now i’m doing most of the work myself to figure out how I should provide exceptional service in this industry. Systemisation comes later.

Some benefits of taking this approach:

1. Churn is much much lower, we’ve been operating for 3 months and none of our clients have left.
2. Clients are happy to provide amazing testimonials [https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/flowspark.co] and refer you business
3. High-levels of fulfilment - you know you’re solving your clients pain points and doing it extremely well.
4. Overall just less stressful - you’re no longer hunting for the next client or waiting for the next client to leave, instead your sole job becomes to ensure your clients are loving the service.

Challenges

Client Acquisition - running an agency is quite competitive, there's 1000 over Webflow agencies out there. What worked for me well last time, was sharing helpful resources relevant to the agency to prove that we can deliver results. I'm taking a similar approach right now, and it's how I got most of my clients. However, there's a lot of noise in the market with amazing companies and so doing something unique is becoming harder and harder.

This is something i'll definitely be thinking about for the next few months - "How do I become a leader in the Webflow Space and the go-to agency?"

Managing Team - Even though i've done this before, i've been creating new SOPs and training the team to provide an excellent level of service to all our clients. However this process is quite hands-on and involves a lot of calls and training. This is taking quite a bit of my time for the past month.

Fear of Churn - There's always that fear in the back of my mind that clients will leave. Each day I'm trying to remind myself to focus on providing an excellent service as I think it's the best way forward long-term. 70% of my time is on service delivery and the other 30% is on LinkedIn Marketing and Side project marketing.

Goals for next Month

Goals for this month is to continue with refining SOPs and training the team. In addition, i’ll also be continuing with cold outreach on LinkedIn and side project marketing.

If you guys would like to connect feel free to follow me on Twitter. If you need help managing/building your site, i’d love to connect at flowspark.co! If you have any questions, feel free to post it below and I'll get back to you as soon as I can :)