I’ve built a multi-7-figure agency from zero, and I can tell you with honesty that it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. On the other hand, when I’m asked if the hard work, late and often sleepless nights were worth it, the answer is undoubtedly yes.
Make no mistake, though, not every agency will scale to that million in annual revenue and importantly, not every entrepreneur wants a business of that size. But there is a process to follow, footsteps if you will. Today, I will show you both the practical and tactical changes that must happen to build a multi-million-pound creative business without sacrificing creativity or integrity.
When you’re starting from zero, you’ve got nothing but an idea and maybe some skills. Most people begin with freelancing – doing some design work, building websites, or creating content for clients they can scrape together. That’s the foundation, but it’s not a scalable agency yet.
To build a 7-figure agency, you need to go through several distinct phases, and I’m going to walk you through exactly what each phase looks like.
Phase 1: From Zero to £10K Monthly
At this stage, you need to focus on three critical things: picking one niche, establishing one reliable client acquisition channel, and creating a proven service offering.
Picking one niche is absolutely essential. I know it sounds counterintuitive when you’re desperate for any client, but focusing on one specific industry – whether that’s manufacturers, gyms, restaurants, SaaS companies, or whoever – allows you to become the specialist rather than a generalist. In my agency, we focused exclusively on the hospitality initially, because that’s where I had contacts and at that time, the hotel and restaurant scene was booming in Belfast. This focus allowed us to establish ourselves in a competitive marketin,g and this became the foundation of our growth.
Next, you need one reliable client acquisition channel. This could be cold outreach on LinkedIn, setting up strategic partnerships, running simple paid ads, or leveraging your existing network. The key is to pick just ONE method and master it completely. When I started my agency, we relied solely on outbound sales calls. Because back then, there was no social media. I made 100 calls a da,y setting up meetings with potential clients. Not for one second am I suggesting you do this. In fact my process today is far removed from the one that built my first business. I primarily use the method of social selling via LinkedIn and Instagram, and it’s highly effective. But none of us should try to do everything at the start. Focusing on maximising just one sales channel and getting really good at it is good enough right now.
Finally, you need to create a proven service offering. This means packaging your creative skills into something specific and tangible that solves a clear problem for your niche. Instead of saying “we do social media,” you might offer “Social Media for Law Firms.” This specificity makes it easier for clients to understand your offering, easier for you to hone the language and tone of voice and the expectations of this market. Ultimately, it makes it easier for your prospective customers to say yes.
Once you’ve got these three pieces working together, you can reach that £10K monthly revenue mark with just yourself and maybe one other person helping out in service delivery. I have absolutely no issue with you bringing on freelancers to help complete projects, but even at this stage, you should be able to provide robust briefing docs for them and understand what the financial impact is on a project when you do so.
You should only bring freelancers on if you remain profitable doing so.
Phase 2: From £10K to £50K Monthly
Some of you might be able to achieve 50k months on your own, but the truth is, the majority of us will need support to do so. In this phase, we’re moving from solopreneur to entrepreneur. It’s where the real agency building begins. To scale from £10K to £50K monthly, you need to focus on creating systems, building your initial team, and refining your sales process.
First, you need proper systems in place. When it was just you in the business, every decision you made affected your bottom line. If the decision worked, great; if not, you lived with the consequences. However, when you bring on team members, every decision they make is ultimately your responsibility.
Every process you want completed to your standard…well, you need to define what that is so someone other than you can do it. Create step-by-step processes for client onboarding, project management, delivery, and client communication. In my agency, we created detailed SOPS for every single service we offered, which allowed us to hire and train people quickly.
You also need systems in place. Do you have a CRM and a project management tool to complete projects? Every contact you have is potential revenue; without a CRM, you’re leaving sales to chance. And when you get these sales, do the resulting projects get completed in a timely manner, to the client’s deadline, satisfaction and to the agreed cost?
Systems cost money to implement, but in return, you provide visibility into every area of your business. This visibility and understanding of what’s working and what’s not is the key to scaling your agency to 1 million plus.
Next, you need to build your initial team. At this stage, you’ll typically need a few key people, and this depends highly on your business set up. My first hires were revenue-generating. They worked within the studio as designers or developers and each month they took over full delivery of the creative work. My job was to fill their days through sales. If you’re not naturally a salesperson, you may consider bringing on someone to sell your services, but in my opinion, the founders must know every function of their business fully before they hire for the role. In this phase they should be the primary driver of the sales function, even if supported by a salesperson.
Now if I get back to the hiring of employees. This is where most creative founders get stuck – they can’t let go of the creative work. It’s the work they love and they often find the business side boring, or “cringe” as one client told me recently.
But if you want to scale, you have to become the architect of your business rather than the labourer.
You also need to refine your sales process. Create a repeatable sales system that converts consistently. This isn’t about being pushy – it’s about having a clear framework for understanding client needs, presenting solutions, handling objections, and closing deals. When I built my agency, we developed a robust sales process that anyone could follow, which meant I didn’t have to be on every single call.
With that in mind, I’ve created a sales course for agency owners. It’s called Selling Creative Services, and not only does it take you through all the steps noted today in much greater depth, but it provides you with the knowledge, frameworks and tools to scale your agency. From setting targets and cashflow, to prospecting, maximising your pitch and communicating effectively, this course is the culmination of my experience in building a multi-million-pound business and working with dozens of creative founders who have successfully scaled their agencies. It’s a great resource to learn and implement to build you business with.
You can click on the link below the video or head over to courses.moveatpace.com and sign up for the waitlist with the code LAUNCH50, for 50% off the normal price.
At this point in business, you should also start to consider a multi-channel approach to sales. The processes that get you to 50k months might sustain you at that level. The chances, however, are that they won’t be able to take your business to the next level, and so you need to consider where your next leads come from. Referrals, affiliations, tenders, partnerships, other sales methods and marketing are all part of a multi-channel approach you need to implement in your business. Sales and marketing work best together. But they must always be monitored to ensure you understand where your money is best spent and so that growth can be determined and controlled more precisely.
Phase 3: From £50K to £100K+ Monthly
To break through the £83,334 monthly barrier and hit that 7-figure annual revenue, you need to focus on three critical areas: streamlining operations, expanding your acquisition channels, and developing leadership.
Streamlining operations means implementing sophisticated project management systems, creating dashboards to track KPIS, and optimising your delivery processes for maximum efficiency. At this stage, you may retain some design or creative endeavours, but the reality is that you’ll primarily live within your CRM workflows, your accounts package or project management dashboards, ensuring that the people around you are delivering what’s needed for your clients. This level of organisation is what separates 6-figure agencies from 7-figure agencies.
There’s no more winging it, although I’d say there is a lot of unknowns, but data and understanding of revenue and output are the key.
If we consider sales first, you need to expand and optimise your client acquisition channels. At this point, you should have 2-3 reliable methods for bringing in new business. In my agency, we were using strategic partnerships, direct outreach, we focused heavily on seo and content marketing, we ran billboards, radio ads and paid digital ads. We sponsored events, had an annual marketing plan that compounded year after year. We had referral schemes, a client contact matrix to ensure that each of our clients fully understood our entire offering.
These channels working together created a consistent pipeline of high-quality prospects. And this is important because we had zero revenue in retained business. Every month, we started on the 1st day by resetting our revenue to zero. While you can absolutely see the flaw in this, it meant our client acquisition had to be robust and always on. Today, I do things very differently and recommend that my agency clients focus on some retained work at a bare minimum.
Finally, you need to develop leadership within your team. You can’t be the only decision-maker anymore. Create departments with clear leaders – someone heading creative, someone managing client relationships, someone overseeing operations.
It can be really hard to let go of the business you founded. But there are great people out there who will help you scale your business to greater heights. They’ll complete many tasks better than you could ,and they’ll multiply the effort you put into your business. These leaders need to be empowered to make decisions without you.
I struggled letting go at first. So I took baby steps. If any problem costs less than £50 to fix. Fix it, no questions asked. Quickly, I saw the results and freedom this gave, so we set other expectations and eventually the team around me were running their respective departments, freeing me up to do more in the areas I was strongest and enjoyed most.
Finally, in this phase, we need to consider our service offering. Why do companies like Coca-Cola find it easy to scale? And why is it so hard for agencies to do the same? Well, Coca-Cola sell a product. They create something once and repeat it many times over. Agencies that sell services primarily focus on custom outputs. But to scale, we must increase the product-like attributes in our service offerings.
How can you package your creative services in a way that’s repeatable, scalable, and consistent? This doesn’t mean compromising on quality – it means creating frameworks that deliver exceptional results consistently. It means gaining efficiency in every area of the project, from prospecting to completion, and it means ensuring that every team member realises the true impact of their time on the project. When you focus on this, you can begin to scale your agency efficiently and sustainably
Mistakes, I’ve Made a Few
If you have watched my videos before, you’ll know I say it’s easier and cheaper to learn from my mistakes than to make them yourself. I have made every mistake imaginable in business, and I’ve used each one as an opportunity to learn from.
But now you don’t have to follow in these footsteps, and you can ensure you don’t make the same.
First, is trying to do too many things at once. You work with any and every client, offer every service under the sun, and try to use every marketing channel simultaneously. Focus is your friend. At the start, everyone was our customer, we called every business and sold our service. But when we honed in on our ideal clients and offering, this became a much more streamlined and easier process.
Second, not charging enough. I sold my first logo for £150. That’ll take 3 hours at £50 an hour. Easy. Job done. Before I exited the business, our branding packages were often sold in the 15-20k range. Now, I’ll admit, the service was very different, but if you’d have told me when I sold the £150 logo that one day we’d command those fees, I’d have laughed.
Creative agencies consistently undervalue their services. If you want to build a 7-figure business, you need to charge premium rates that support a team, systems, and your profit margins. But you must have the service that provides this value in return for the customer. I detail this a lot in my course. A shameless plug, but definitely buy it if you want to scale your agency.
Third, the founder is staying too involved in delivery. You need to transition from doing the work to leading the business. This means trusting your team and focusing on strategy and other areas of the business where your input can compound. I appreciate that many of you will have dreamed of delivering the big projects and staying fully involved in project delivery, but the truth is that if you wanted this job, you wouldn’t have started your own agency.
Fourth, not having a consistent sales process. The feast/famine cycle happens when you don’t have a reliable way to close new business. You need a repeatable framework that works without your constant involvement. I’m not going to make this another shameless plug for the Selling Creative Services course. But just read the name of it one more time. It provides the framework to scale your agency. It does the thinking, it provides you with knowledge and gives you tools to grow your business. It’s a great investment in time and money if you want more freedom and money from your agency.
Take Action
I wrote this article at 7 am on a Monday morning. I’ve got up for client calls at 4 am, because that’s when a client in Australia is just about to finish up for the day. Working hard isn’t the deciding factor in your success, but if you don’t put the effort in, you can’t be disappointed with the results.
Building a 7-figure creative agency takes a lot of work and a lot of learning as you move through each of the phases. But if youre willing to put the effort in, it is completely achievable if you follow the steps and processes noted before. Of course, they are just the starting point, but the roadmap is the same for the majority of service businesses I’ve worked with.
If you’re ready to scale your creative agency to 7-figures without sacrificing creativity or integrity, then sign up for my new course, “Selling Creative Services.” You’ll get 50% off using code LAUNCH50 when you join because youve watched this content, and I’ll show you exactly how to implement these systems and more in your business.
So click the link below, sign up now, and I’ll see you inside the course.