How to Run a Small Agency: The 5 Numbers to Check Every Week

How to run a small agency: watch your pipeline, utilization, margin, cash, and overdue invoices. Five numbers, checked every Friday. Here is the whole system. Running a small agency is three jobs at once: selling, delivering, and getting paid. Without a system, owners sell when work runs out, deliver late at night, and invoice when they remember.

A system gives each job a time slot, a number, and one place to work. Let's build it, starting with what you sell. 'Marketing support' is vague. 'A new site in six weeks, then monthly updates' is a package. A good package has a fixed scope, a fixed price, and a clear finish line.

Sell one core package plus a few add-ons. Fewer offers means faster delivery and easier hiring. Pick one kind of client too: list who you serve, find your best fit, and the package gets faster every time. Say no to one-off projects outside your package. Each one slows the next one down.

An SOP is just a checklist for a task you repeat. It is how the agency runs without you. Start with three: onboarding a client, delivering the core package, and sending invoices. Record a quick screen video while you do the task, then turn it into steps. Update it whenever someone asks you the same question twice.

Margin first. Say you keep twenty-eight percent after team costs. Price from hours, not habit, and aim for about half. To price a project: estimate the hours, multiply by what each hour costs you, then add your margin on top. Say the team costs fifty dollars an hour, and a project takes forty hours.

Price it near four thousand, and about half is left after the team is paid. To raise prices, give existing clients notice, and the new price starts two months later. New clients pay it from today. Retainers help too. Steady monthly work makes the whole calendar easier to plan.

Even at three people, every job needs one owner. Shared jobs quietly become nobody's job. Name an owner for sales and proposals, delivery and quality, and invoices and follow-up. In a small agency, you might own all three. Write that down anyway.

Then hand them off, one at a time, as the work grows. The week: Monday, plan and sell. A short daily check-in. Client updates on Thursday. Numbers on Friday.

Keep the daily check-in to ten minutes: what's due, what's stuck, and who needs help. Put selling on the calendar like client work, so it still happens in busy weeks. Friday matters most: fifteen minutes with your five numbers, every week. Utilization is the share of hours you can bill. Cut the busywork, and aim for about three quarters.

Don't plan anyone at a hundred percent. Leave room for sales, admin and the surprise rush. Track three numbers per person: hours available, hours booked, and hours billed. Before you sell a big project, check who actually has the hours. Hire when the work is steady, not because one month was busy.

Before your first hire, write down how the work is done, test it with a contractor, then hire for the role that is always full. Contractors flex with the work. Employees make sense when the hours are there every week. Pay a contractor for a small test project before you hand over a big one. And give each person access to their own clients, not the whole business.

When clients reach you by email, texts and DMs, messages pile up, and the one that matters gets buried. So, per client: one channel, one weekly update, and reply hours they know. Send the weekly update even when nothing changed. Silence makes clients nervous. Our videos on onboarding and managing clients go deeper.

Both are linked below. Get paid as you go: split the fee, invoice on a schedule, and cash arrives before the work ends. Cash: a month and a half of costs in the bank is thin. Take deposits, and build toward three months. Ask new clients for a deposit before work starts.

It also filters out the clients who were never going to pay. And overdue invoices: six thousand past due. Remind on the due date, then weekly, until it reaches zero. Many small agencies run on a CRM, a task app, a timer and invoicing. It works, until something falls through.

List every tool and what it costs each month. Many owners find one they forgot. Fewer tools means fewer handoffs, and your five numbers live in one place. Here's that system in Workspace369. Each project has a budget and progress.

Tasks move on a board, and progress updates as the work moves. In Workspace369, the team runs a timer, stops it, bills the hours, straight onto an invoice. In the catalog, set a service price, add what it costs you, and see the gross margin. Share a project link, the client confirms a code, and sees progress, files and invoices, all in one place. The client opens the invoice, pays online, and it shows as paid in your app.

Keep the next step visible: start with the request, confirm the work, then follow through to the invoice. And client-scoped access keeps each contractor inside their own clients. Every Friday: check all five against their targets, fifteen minutes, then fix the one in the red first. Fix one number a week. By the end of the year, that adds up to a calmer agency.

Four mistakes: taking every kind of project, pricing by gut, hiring for one busy month, and checking numbers only at tax time. The biggest one: no time on the calendar for running the business itself. Pick the one that hurts most, and fix it this month. Which of the five numbers is hardest for your agency? Tell me in the comments.

The weekly checklist is in the description.