Blog
Short, specific pieces on running a marketing agency well: retainers, hours, invoices and margin. Written by people who run one.
Time tracking for agencies: pace the retainer, don't police the team
Agency time tracking exists to pace the retainer by department: cap used, days left, projected burn. The rules per billing model, and who should see what.
Invoicing for marketing agencies: the four billing models
Retainers in advance, pre-paid overages, hourly in arrears and media pass-through. What each one needs from your invoicing, with a real sample invoice.
CRM for marketing agencies: what a generic CRM gets wrong
A generic CRM stops at closed-won. Your agency needs the scope to carry into a proposal, a project with budgets and an invoice. Here is what to look for.
How to price a marketing agency retainer (and stop giving work away)
A practical way to price drawdown retainers by department, write an overage rule that holds, and track the servicing gap so the account stays profitable.
Time tracking that agency teams actually do
Why time tracking dies in agencies, and the six settings — rounding, notes, approvals, locks, targets and visibility — that make your team stick with it.
Agency profitability: hours × rate is lying to you
Why the standard profitability report overstates your revenue and buries idle time, and how to work out real margin from contracted revenue and absorbed cost.
White-label client reporting: what 'on your own domain' really means
The checklist for reports that look like they came from you: domain, fonts, colors, footer, email identity, and the numbers a refresh must never touch.
Switching agency software: a migration checklist that doesn't lose a month
The order to migrate CRM, time and billing data, how to dry-run an import, and what to keep read-only until you are certain nothing was lost.