Agency hires I've seen crush: - stayed in one full-time job for 3+ years - want more structure and a team to grow inside - set up their own reference call - nail a test project before the final interview - show up to meetings - take a handover and keep it handed over - came through a referral - were great team members somewhere else first

If you still needed a reason to NEVER copy productivity advice built for solopreneurs: My whole leadership team got locked in a Zoom every Monday. Every leader at an 8-figure agency. The only people who could actually make a decision. 6 hours of back-to-back calls with our own team. I called it "Monday Meetings." 6 hours later, Slack had stacked up: client requests sat untouched and nobody could move without a decision. The catch-up jumps in on Tuesday with another 24 hours of work. When I finally added it up, I was like... let me get this straight. I locked every leader away on the busiest day of the week. Froze everyone else's work. Watched the fires start while nobody could reach us. And lost a day and a half, every single week. I ran it that way for 6 months. I already moved it: two calls a day, Tuesday through Thursday, in end-of-day slots.

This is actually insane Andy runs a UK paid media agency for ecom brands, and he moved his whole team into pods with 0 clients lost Usually there's a casualty or two His chase log is in my article, with the rest of the fixes

I interviewed Adam Matthews, who runs a 7-year-old ecom agency, and he cut churn from 14% to 8%. A few of the changes: - He split churn by team member after one really bad month - One sat at 5% and another at 22%, doing the same job - He stopped signing brands he wasn't very confident in - Bad news now comes as a long message, a voice note or a Loom Agency owners, it's all in the article (bookmark for later)

Ctrl + C the article Ctrl + V into Claude with every client from the last 12 months (tier, account owner, start and end date) Ask which tier and which account owner your churn really comes from

POV: You realized your 12% churn was 5% on enterprise clients and 30% on small accounts

We grew WKND 40% in a year and hit eight figures. The potentially defining factor: early on as COO, I shut down our most popular service line. After seeing small clients cause 80% of our problems, I closed WKDY, our brand for clients paying $1,500-$3,000 a month, entirely. We were giving a $1,500 a month client more of our time than a $20,000 one, and that includes acting as their CFO, CMO and COO. There's a lot you can get wrong here. This is what helped us get there: 1) Check which clients your delivery model was built for. Ours was built off clients with their own in-house teams. It assumed every client had one. Small accounts broke our pods, our SOPs and our capacity planning. A second brand for small clients looks like smart diversification on paper. At volume it comes down to focus. We chose to focus on the $30-70K a month clients. 2) Shut it down as fast as possible. We moved all of its capacity to our bigger ICP clients. No new headcount. The less energy we spent on accounts paying 20% of revenue, the better retention and delivery got. It was the most profitable decision I made as COO. 3) Don't offer them a cheaper tier. An agency owner I talked to wanted a $1,500 a month tier. His MRR had dropped from $60K to around $40-50K. You either deliver it with the same onboarding, reporting and Slack threads as a $15,000 client, or you build a second, worse business inside your first one.

15 months of being a dad Here's a few things I've learned Your marriage won't get time unless you schedule it. My wife and I walk 2 miles every morning, before either of us has touched a phone. Because evenings disappear into bedtime routines and weekends fill up with family logistics. If we waited for free time to talk, we'd talk once a month. Spending 2-3 hours a day with your daughter or son is the most productive thing you can do. You will have less time for work. Would the business grow faster if I worked another 90 minutes a day? 100%. She went from eight teeth and rolling over to walking this year. I can't take credit for any of it, but she's the best part of every day. You stop taking every client who can pay. I'm at capacity with a waitlist instead. I've watched plenty of founders, me included, build the business at the cost of everything else. Sounds harsh, but as the business grows you show up less, and your family feels it before you notice. My daughter is 15 months old, so I haven't figured fatherhood out yet. So the question I keep asking is what kind of dad gets the first call from his kids, 20 years from now, when something good happens. Building the business around your family, not the other way around, is the ultimate flex in life.

"Give it 90 days" is a horrible thing to tell a new agency client. If they're not seeing some kind of result within a few weeks, they'll probably churn before day 90. I've set those 90-day expectations myself, with a nice visual and everything. I share the 14-day onboarding I'd use now here:

Hills I will 100% die on as a former agency COO: - Net-new clients is the only number your hiring should sit on. - A blended churn rate hides your worst tier. - Two people doing the same job can churn at 5% and 22%. - A new client should see something by day 7, even if it's a quick Loom. - Set your Slack SLA at 3 hours, then answer in 1. All 5 are broken down in the article below:

A $1.4M agency cut its ad hoc client calls within a month with one slide. Every slide in their client deck judged the agency, and none of them tracked the client's side. Meanwhile, this client sent assets 2-3 weeks late and still complained about turnaround. We added one slide called production health. On every call it shows: - How many deliverables got done - What share shipped on time - How long turnaround took - How many revisions each one needed The first one showed the client's assets landing 8 days past deadline on average. I broke down the rest in the article below.

Andy, who runs a UK paid media agency for ecom brands, on why clients fire their agencies: "If you're paying for a service, the last thing you want to do is feel like you have to chase for it." He breaks down how his team got to a 0% chase rate here, and the full fix is in my article:

This year I: - Hired a sales coach for one month - Put $7-8K a month into AI - Spent 30+ hours in June hiring my first Head of Operations - Took my first trip alone with my wife since our daughter was born The ROI: my close rate went from 31% to 6 out of 10, and I was up 123% for the year by June. For six months I'd been treating my close rate like a market problem. I still put 10-20% of revenue back into upskilling myself.

Claude cut a $1.3M agency's playbook build from 10-14 days to 5. (My FULL Claude setup for agency operations, for free) This setup: ● turns every Loom into a written process ● lines up how each person does the same job, side by side ● and turns it all into one playbook for the whole team This works so well for AI, because agency ops is really just a chain of repeatable steps that only live in people's heads right now. That said... I'd rather just hand you the whole setup free. Inside the blueprint: ● the 5 Claude skills I use for agency operations ● the agents ● the prompts ● the full Cowork setup ● the SOP Builder Want it? Comment "CLAUDE", give me a follow, and I'll DM it over.

You'll never lose a new client to 9 days of silence again after reading this article

5% churn vs 22% churn = 2 people doing the same job. Adam Matthews found it at AQM, the 7-year-old ecom agency he runs. After one really bad month, most of the cancellations traced back to one guy. I wrote out how to find the person who's losing your clients: - Split churn by account owner - Start with the 22% person's clients - Set a standard for bad news - A longer message, a voice note or a Loom Full breakdown in the article:

This agency owner's pipeline was insane Signed 10 new clients in half a year and still stuck at $97K a month Broke down why in the article below (Steal it)

Hormozi told a Facebook ads agency they'd found a way to take $2,000 and turn it into zero. Their clients stayed 5 months on average. In other words, 20% churn every month. Across the 27 agencies I've worked with ($36M+ in revenue between them), the same 5 churn mistakes show up again and again. So I wrote out how to fix each one: - Count your net-new clients - Split churn by tier - Split churn by account owner - A 14-day onboarding - A chase log - Etc Full breakdown in the article below:

POV: You realize bro just leaked why agencies lose their clients after month 6