Right, if you’re running an agency and you’re serious about growth, you need to get these four things sorted before the end of the quarter. No excuses.
1. Review Your Outstanding Quotes (And Get a CRM if You Haven’t Already)
First thing – go through every single quote sitting in your system. Everything that’s outstanding, everything that’s been sitting there waiting. You need to discuss these with clients now if you want any chance of getting them across the line.
The longer you leave a quote outstanding, the less likely you are to win that work. It’s that simple.
If you don’t have a CRM, this process will take you days, not hours. You’ll be hunting through emails, trying to remember conversations or missing quotes entirely. I see agency owners all the time who are trying to scale without a CRM, and it’s madness.
You will forget to follow up. All of that is lost revenue.
Having a CRM from the earliest stage of your business allows you to scale so much more effectively. It becomes your second brain – you don’t have to remember everything because the system remembers for you. You don’t miss quotes because they’re all tracked in one place.
The best CRM for agencies is the one you actually use. But more importantly, the owners of the business, those intrinsically linked to profitability – need to be the superusers. You need to be the Oracle, understand what works and what doesn’t. If you don’t know your CRM inside out, learn it. This is where the money is in your business.
What you need to do:
- If you don’t have a CRM, get one. Today. Not next week.
- Pull every outstanding quote from your system
- Sort them by how long they’ve been sitting there
- Hit the recent ones first
- For the older ones, don’t just chase, add value. Share a case study, give them something new
Stop asking “Are you still interested?” Start showing them why they should be.
2. Create Your Client-Service Matrix (Your Hidden Revenue Mine)
This is where most agencies are leaving money on the table. You need a clear view of which clients get which services, and more importantly, which services they should be getting but aren’t.
Not every client understands all the services you offer. You might have historic clients who started with you when you only did branding, but now you do digital marketing or something else entirely. They’re looking for opportunities to work more with you and remember, it’s easier to keep existing clients than get new ones.
Focus your attention on keeping clients within your ecosystem and building out total revenue from each client, rather than always chasing the next new prospect.
Set up a Google Sheet. Client names down the left column and all your services across the top. Tick off what each client currently uses. The empty boxes? That’s your upselling opportunity right there.
Before you start having these conversations, make sure you’ve got all your assets ready: case studies, proposals, pricing. Nothing kills momentum like telling a client you’ll “send something over later.”
3. Audit Your Invoicing (This One Will Save You Thousands)
This is the big one. I can’t stress this enough because I’ve learned this lesson the hard way.
When we were scaling our agency, we’d find tens of thousands of pounds, sometimes more, of unbilled work at the end of every quarter. Our biggest shock was discovering we hadn’t billed a brand redesign worth £15k. The client was extremely happy with the project and even were happier that we’d just forgotten to invoice it.
This happened because of staff changes. One team member had left and hadn’t billed the job before it was completed. Perfectly normal staff turnover, but it slipped through the cracks.
Before we implemented our CRM, we were running around the office with yellow sheets, literally paper documents with client details, job pricing, project details, briefs. We were handling about 500 jobs per month, and these yellow sheets were floating around the office. As you can imagine, paper-based documents get lost, left on someone’s desk when they go on holiday, or just disappear.
Our focus became removing this manual handling and manual errors. We implemented Streamtime CRM, an old FileMaker Pro database system that’s since been discontinued. But that single change took our business from small to much bigger and infinitely scalable.
Most agencies lose potential revenue simply because they don’t capture this properly. I rarely see agencies following a robust audit process at the level needed to scale.
Our invoice audit process:
- Check your project management system against every single job from the last quarter
- Review everything for scope creep and unbilled items added after the quote
- Make sure invoices were actually sent
- Check with accounts to see if invoices were paid (flag overdue payments)
- Document everything that’s slipped through
You’re probably sitting on more unbilled revenue than you think. The longer it sits, the more likely it gets forgotten entirely. This audit alone could fund your next hire.
4. Get Your Sales Team Aligned
If you’ve got a sales team, every single person needs to know exactly where they are against target. Not roughly. Exactly!
Sit down with each team member. Show them their year-to-date performance against their annual target. If they’re behind, they need a plan. Not tomorrow, not next week, now.
These aren’t performance reviews. These are strategic planning sessions focused on one thing: hitting target.
Ask them:
- What specific activities will you focus on to hit your numbers?
- Which deals in your pipeline are most likely to close?
- What do you need from me to accelerate results?
A strong finish to the quarter sets you up for serious growth in the next one.
Warning Signs Your Agency Needs This Audit
There are red flags you need to be aware of when this type of audit is happening in your agency.
If you’re missing monthly targets, having cash flow issues, or hearing your team say “Oh, I thought somebody else was going to bill that” or “I forgot to add that in”. These are major warning signs.
These things need to happen automatically. You have to be able to trust your team, your sales team, account managers and designers to kick billing issues back up to the person absolutely responsible for creating and managing invoices. If you’re not sure, this eventually is you.
If those handoffs aren’t happening, that’s scope creep in disguise. You’re losing money on projects that would have otherwise been retained profit.
You need systems in place to identify these elements promptly. When they become recurring issues, you need to address them with team members through training, and performance management if required.
Common Objections (And Why They’re Costing You Money)
Most agency owners tell me they don’t have the time for this level of detail. But when we start to quantify the value of potential missed business, when we spot £1k or £2k that slipped through, their mindset shifts completely. Suddenly they realise this is absolutely critical.
The biggest mistake you can make is assuming your team will do this for you. You might have a big team, small team, or be a solopreneur. This falls on the person most accountable for revenue and that’s you, the agency owner.
You don’t have to do all the work yourself, but you need to know the process and manage the team doing it.
This should happen regularly. Not just once at the end of every quarter and forget about it. This should be weekly check-ins with bigger audits at quarter-end. If you’re missing invoices quarterly, you’re definitely missing them weekly.
If you don’t do this regularly, if you’re not on top of your finances, accounts, and projects at this level – you’re losing money. That makes it harder and harder for your business to grow and maintain profitability.
When times are good, it’s easy to overlook these things or say “I’ll figure that out later.” But when times get tough, it’s 10 times harder to implement these processes.
Your Timeline
- Week 1: Sort your quotes (and implement a CRM if you don’t have one)
- Week 2: Build your client-service matrix
- Week 3: Audit your invoicing
- Week 4: Align your sales team
Ongoing: Weekly check-ins on quotes and invoicing, quarterly deep audits
The Real World
These aren’t nice-to-have activities. If you’re serious about scaling from £2k to £200k months, this is the foundation work that makes it possible.
Most agency owners are too busy working in the business to work on it. The ones who scale are the ones who pause, assess, and optimise.
Don’t let another quarter slip by leaving this to chance
What’s Next?
If you’re reading this and thinking “I need help getting this systematic approach into my agency,” you’ve got two options:
Option 1: Book a strategic discovery call with me. We’ll look at where you are, where you want to be, and exactly what needs to happen to get there. Book here – https://moveatpace.com/discovery-call
Option 2: If you’re ready to dive deeper into systematising your agency for growth, check out my Selling Creative Services course. It’s live now with 50% off using code launch50. Get it at https://courses.moveatpace.com/selling-creative-services
The choice is yours. But the work needs to get done either way.