Grow Your Agency Faster by Focusing on These 5 Areas

If you’re an agency owner or a freelancer who’s quickly adding new clients to your portfolio, you know that growth can be a tricky process. 

On the one hand, new projects and more work flowing in is (presumably!) what you want, but as you add new accounts and expand your professional footprint, keeping track of all the moving parts can start to add up. 

As your business grows, you’ll find that this can get unwieldy pretty quickly. The billing and invoicing you’ve set up for one client may not be the right fit for another, and simultaneously working on separate projects — from client-focused hosting and bulk-site management to an SEO audit or UX design — can all start to make you feel maxed out, even if you’re hungry for new business. 

If this sounds familiar, if your business is growing faster than you expected, or you’re stretched too thin and not growing fast enough, it may be time to start thinking about how you take your business to the next level.

While the following areas may seem purely “administrative” in nature, implementing a clear process around each one will ultimately save you time, while setting your business up for continued growth and predictable monthly recurring revenue (MRR): 

• Revenue tracking – gaining a clear understanding of your revenue breakdown in detail while looking for trends and new opportunities.
• Billing and invoicing – running a tight ship when it comes to creating and sending timely, easy-to-understand requests for payment.
• Scope of work – clearly defining your services and pricing upfront, alleviating confusion at later stages.  
• Continued client-first support and management – ensuring you’re able to focus on every client as needed while providing the high level of work they’ve come to expect from you.
• High-performance hosting – providing your clients with blazing fast site speeds, secure and reliable infrastructure, and troubleshooting solutions when inevitable issues arise. 

WP Engine’s Growth Suite, a solution built for growing agencies and freelancers, brings all of these processes together under one roof. With an intuitive dashboard to help you see trends and understand revenue streams in more detail, Growth Suite makes it easy for you to keep track of your clients and most importantly, make money for the services you’re selling. 

While managing these processes using a single solution is ideal, each of these areas can provide excellent opportunities for better organization and streamlined growth within your agency or freelance business. Here’s a closer look at how:

Track All of Your Revenue, Together, for Data-Driven Insights

Gaining a bird’s-eye-view into your revenue stream is one of the best ways to start growing your business more effectively. With a clear look at clients that pay promptly, hosting revenue insights, and projects that generate more profit, you can better plan for trends, and start making data-informed decisions around your services and business strategy.

You have a number of choices when it comes to accounting software or even DIY approaches to help you gain a central view of your revenue stream, and Growth Suite is indeed an excellent option here as well. What’s most important is that you gain that unified view and you begin tracking it over time for insights and trends that can help guide your business growth.

Once you do, you’ll be able to put a plan in place that leads to consistent MRR, bringing in predictable revenue each month that you can continue building on. 

Simplify Client Billing and Invoicing with a Reliable Process

When you first start taking on clients, you may be inclined to accommodate individual payment and invoicing requests. That might work at first, but managing clients with separate, disjointed billing processes is a recipe for frustration (at the very least) as you continue to grow.

Streamlining billing and invoicing into a single, reliable, and simple process helps you reduce confusion and ensure that you’re getting paid for all of the work you do. Setting that process up now, even if it feels time-consuming, will pay dividends later. 

Refine Your Service Offerings With a Clear Scope of Work

Because you’re eager to please each client, you may have been willing to expand the definition of your services as you’ve taken on new projects. While accommodating client needs is certainly important, you also need to set boundaries and clearly-defined parameters for what one service is and what others are not. 

By clearly defining your list of services, going as far as to delineate tiered offerings, where applicable, you can more effectively provide those services at scale, and set expectations from the beginning of a client relationship as to what will or won’t be included in your scope of work.

Not only will this save you time and confusion down the line, it also makes billing and invoicing more effective, and provides welcome transparency to both you and your clients. 

Invest in a Branded, Client-First Approach

Every one of your clients is unique, you get that — that’s why they’re your clients, but how do you continue providing them with the attention they need as you land more business? 

For starters, make sure you have an organized ledger of all client accounts, following the same format for each. This way, you have always have detailed client information at your fingertips— no chasing emails or random documents as you prep for your next call. 

Another method used by many agencies is to offer clients their own individual portal, where they can access the portfolio of work you’ve done for them, view and submit payments, and contact you, as needed. This offers each of your clients a white-glove level of service that keeps them connected to you and the work you’re doing.  

Managing it all under your own brand is the cherry on top. By providing clients with their own individual digital space, temporary domains, and even email communications within your agency-branded client portal, they will feel like you’re on Madison Avenue, even if you’re just a couple of streets off Main Street.

Speed, Security, and Support That Comes with a Trusted Managed Hosting Platform

Focusing on the above suggestions will go a long way in helping you manage your clients while keeping track of all of the services you’re providing as your business grows. The last ingredient is making sure the work you’re doing and the sites you’re building are all hosted on a fast, reliable platform.  

By streamlining your client management processes using Growth Suite, you can crush all of the above processes while also benefiting from the features that come with a world-class managed hosting platform, including blazing fast site speeds, super-secure infrastructure, collaborative workflow tools, and 24/7 support.

This combination of robust client management tools together with industry-leading performance offers a one-two punch for agencies looking to grow. With clear organization and professional-grade hosting backing up your agency or freelance business, you can embrace new clients with confidence and take your growth to the next level.