I remember sitting in a meeting with a media agency client in Belfast. We had just finished a rebrand for them and the work had gone well. At the end of the meeting I said something I had never said before: “If you know anybody else who needs our service, please send them to us.”
That single sentence led to a chain of accounts in the same industry that became a six-figure annual customer. One ask. One referral. It changed the direction of my agency.
And I nearly never made that ask.
The best lead and the worst strategy
Referrals are brilliant. The trust is already there. The close rate is high. When a client sends someone your way, you have a conversation, not a pitch.
But you cannot control the volume. You cannot predict when they arrive. And you cannot build a business plan around hoping your clients remember to mention you at the right moment.
I sat down with Cathal O’Reilly on the Exit Ready podcast recently. Cathal founded Rooftop Twenty Two, a 14-person digital marketing and web agency in Dublin. He built it from a bedroom in January 2020 to a studio with 17 staff and a client list that includes some of the biggest names in Irish business.
Cathal put it simply:
“Referrals will always be the best lead that comes in. If you get a phone call or an email from someone who’s come recommended from a customer you’ve done good work for before, you have a great chance of winning that client. However, if you’re relying solely on referrals, you have no guarantees of the quantity of leads that are going to come through. It becomes really difficult to build a business if that’s the case.”
He compared it to his own client work. Rooftop helps businesses generate consistent, predictable leads through performance marketing. Their clients know that based on spend, they will get a certain volume of leads with a measurable conversion rate. That predictability is what allows those businesses to plan, hire, and grow.
But when Cathal looked at his own business, the pipeline ran on hope. Good hope, earned hope, but hope all the same.
The pipeline maths
If your agency needs £50,000 in new revenue each month and your average project is £10,000, you need five new clients. If your close rate on referrals is 50%, you need 10 referral conversations per month to hit target.
Can you guarantee that? Last month, how many came in? The month before? If you cannot answer those questions with a number, you have a pipeline problem. The close rate is strong but the input is a guess. That is the difference between a business that grows steadily and one that lurches between feast and famine.
When I ran my agency in Belfast, we tracked our win rate obsessively. I knew that for every 4 proposals we sent, we closed 1. So if I needed £50K in new revenue and my average deal was £12K, I needed roughly 4 new deals, which meant 16 proposals, which meant 30+ conversations. That is the kind of maths referrals alone cannot deliver.
What Cathal changed
The shift for Rooftop was twofold.
First, Cathal started treating his own agency as its best customer. He allocated time and budget to self-marketing: refreshing the website, posting on social media, running their own events. As he said, “Please, please, please place yourself as your best customer. We’ve been guilty of not doing it in the past. Even in recent times, we must do that a little bit more.”
In my agency, we put 10% of revenue from large projects back into self-marketing. Some of that was internal staff time, some was ad budget. We even ran billboards and radio ads at one point. The point is it was deliberate, not something we got round to when we had a quiet week.
Second, Cathal shifted the language. Instead of talking to prospects about creative quality (which they take for granted), he started talking about commercial outcomes. Leads. Conversion rates. Cost per acquisition. Revenue impact. As he put it: “If you’re not even touching on that, they won’t respect you as much as the next agency who does.”
This is the shift from waiting for referrals to actively generating demand. When you position yourself commercially, prospects find you through search, through content, through the language they actually use when looking for help.
Building beyond referrals
Referrals should be one channel, not the only channel. Here is what a balanced pipeline looks like:
Referrals (keep them, systematise them). Do not rely on luck. Make the ask deliberately. I use a simple one-liner with clients: “If you are happy with the work we have done together, is there anyone in your network who could benefit from the same?” That is it. No pressure. No incentive scheme. Just a clear, honest ask at the right moment, typically 3 months into an engagement when the results are visible.
Content that positions you commercially. Blog articles, LinkedIn posts, and videos that speak the language of business outcomes, not creative process. When a marketing director searches for “how to improve e-commerce conversion rates,” your name should appear. That is inbound demand you control.
An assessment that qualifies. Something more useful than a PDF guide. An interactive diagnostic, a scorecard, a tool that gives prospects immediate value and gives you data about their situation. This builds a pipeline of people who have raised their hand and told you what they need.
A consistent publishing cadence. One piece of content per week, minimum. LinkedIn, blog, newsletter, video. The format matters less than the consistency. Cathal’s agency grew on good work. The next phase of growth requires good visibility.
The uncomfortable truth
If you are too busy doing the work to market the business, that is the problem, not the excuse. Cathal admitted he held on to doing the work for three years before making the transition to running the business.
That transition, from being a marketer who happened to run a business to being a business owner who happened to come from marketing, is the single biggest shift an agency founder can make. It starts with accepting that the referral pipeline, however good, has a ceiling.
The agencies that grow past that ceiling are the ones that build a commercial engine alongside their creative engine. They speak commercial language. They invest in their own visibility. They treat their pipeline with the same rigour they apply to client work.
And they still ask for referrals. They just do not depend on them.
What to do this week
- Count your referrals. How many came in last month? The month before? If you cannot predict next month’s number, you have a pipeline problem.
- Ask one client for a referral. Not in a desperate way. Frame it naturally: “Who in your network is dealing with the same challenges you were six months ago?”
- Post one thing on LinkedIn that speaks to a commercial outcome. Not your latest project. A result. A number. A lesson that a business owner would find valuable.
Referrals will always be part of your pipeline. Just make sure they are not the whole thing.
This article is based on a conversation with Cathal O’Reilly on the Exit Ready podcast. Listen to the full episode for Cathal’s insights on pricing, delegation, hiring a production manager, and the moment he stopped being a freelancer with a team.
Go deeper: How to get more clients for your agency | The professional way to ask for referrals