Great creative work deserves margins to match.
Agencies have a particular problem. The work is brilliant, the team is flat out, and somehow the profit never quite shows up. It's nearly always the same three culprits. Quotes built on gut feel, hours that never get recovered, and overheads nobody has loaded into the rates.
I work inside your numbers to fix exactly that. Rate cards that carry every cost including your own salary, quotes you can defend, and a clear view of which clients and retainers actually pay.
I do the bookkeeping as well, not just the advice on top of it. Knowing what a retainer really earns depends on hours and costs being coded to the client in the first place, and in most agency files they are not. When the same person keeps the books and reads them, that gets fixed rather than worked around.
You keep your accountant for the tax. I handle everything before it.
Start with one retainer.
Pick the client everyone assumes is your best one, and I will work out what that account really earns you once every hour on it is loaded in. Three pages in plain English, your numbers in a calculator you keep, and forty five minutes with me. $750, ten business days, and nothing has to change until you want it to.
See how the One Number Review worksWhat does someone on your team really cost you?
You pay them $37 an hour. Once super, leave, workers compensation, allowances and the hours nobody can invoice are loaded in, they cost you closer to $63 for every hour you can actually bill. This calculator does the maths on your own numbers in about five minutes.
Send me the calculatorClient and retainer profitability
What each account actually earns once every hour spent on it is counted, not just the ones that made it onto a timesheet.
Rate cards that include you
Rebuilt to carry salaries, super, leave, software, overheads and your own time, which is usually the cost nobody has priced.
Scope and recovery
Where the quoted hours and the delivered hours part company, and what that gap is costing you each month.
Cashflow forecasting
Retainers, project milestones, BAS, super and payroll mapped weeks ahead, so a big month doesn't become a tight one.
The essentials underneath
Bookkeeping, BAS, payroll and super, done by a registered BAS agent and CPA, all in Xero.
A real example. One agency client's rebuilt rate card revealed the directors were the most under charged people in the building. The fix went into the next round of proposals, with no awkward conversations with existing clients.
Book a free 30 minute call. Bring your current rate card, and I'll tell you what it's missing.
Book a free intro call