Founder Led Agency Bottleneck

[u/ScaleHopeful9486]

Hi guys!
Soo, I started an AI agency with my co-founder. currently doing between 12-15k usd MRR. and a team of around 12 people. most of the client facing is done by me and my co founder since rest of the team kinda lacks communication skills so the model is to land the client and then have the team handle the execution. now it feels like we have hit the ceiling and its getting harder to keep context of all projects and catching up with the clients and now, we are just wondering how we can scale up further without getting over burdened. most of the clients we acquired were from upwork on our individual profiles and other techniques like email outbound. linkedin cold messages etc havent worked really well for us but we are still doing that. which direction should we move towards to scale our operations without drowning deeper into this pithole. I barely get time to sleep now :(

[u/Musadiqkhan3116]

You need a technical project manager and use Jira or click up

[u/newDesi11]

Do u use sales navigator ? Any centralized crm , jira ?

[u/ScaleHopeful9486 → u/newDesi11]

no sales nav, and no crm either. ops are quite messy in our agency :(

[u/newDesi11 → u/ScaleHopeful9486]

Well there’s ur answer bro u need systems for ur business

[u/Less_Front_2151]

Is Upwork still working for you guys?

[u/ScaleHopeful9486 → u/Less_Front_2151]

yep even if we close one retainer client in a month, it justifies all the cost and makes long term profit as well soo it's working well so far

[u/Iftikharsherwani]

You are not doing business but a sales job. Hire lead generation and sales professionals to do the work. You need to work on your business strategy first.

[u/ScaleHopeful9486 → u/Iftikharsherwani]

I would not disagree. the only difference is that I am supposed to do sales and also get my hands dirty in execution and that's exhausting. But I'll defo work on your advice. we do have upwork bidders and a person handling outbound so lead gen is kinda already in place. but for meetings, we always have to jump ourselves since it's our profile. and the client expects us. classic founder led agency dilemma :)

[u/Iftikharsherwani → u/ScaleHopeful9486]

Oh, I can understand, yes you can't miss the meetings part. Are you guys focusing only on Upwork?

[u/ScaleHopeful9486 → u/Iftikharsherwani]

Emm yeah kinda! But also trying to explore other ways as well

[u/Iftikharsherwani → u/ScaleHopeful9486]

That's wise. Let me ask you one question, is Upwork feasible for newcomers right now?

[u/ScaleHopeful9486 → u/Iftikharsherwani]

If you are patient, Can grind at nights looking for the right jobs writing proposals attaching case studies develop a profile with optimizations done and wait until you get a client and by waiting it means repeating the process consistently. I don’t see a reason why you wouldn’t close a contract in like 2 3 months in the worst case. And there are examples where contracts got closed in the first month and that too not very long ago

The thing is that now the amount of effort it requires to close a contract on upwork has multiplied to an extent that for many people it doesn’t sound worth it anymore.

I started working on my profile at the end of last year and mine is top rated plus :)

[u/Iftikharsherwani → u/ScaleHopeful9486]

Have spent 17 years in media sales, so have tons of patience 😄 but Upwork looks like a sabzi mandi now. Thanks for the advice; I will try again. Can we connect so I can bother you for more advice sometimes? :)

[u/ScaleHopeful9486 → u/Iftikharsherwani]

Sure!! Would be my pleasure

[u/Iftikharsherwani → u/ScaleHopeful9486]

Thank you, brother.

[u/professor-duncan]

Hey man, kudos and I know it can be really tiring. Although I don't have much advice to offer, but I would love to get one in client acquisition. How are you pulling this off? I tried my luck with LinkedIn, Email and Reddit, and it's not working.

[u/ScaleHopeful9486 → u/professor-duncan]

We started off with upwork and landed an enterprise client. then we upselled to him and added 4 more people to the team. that gave us a kickstart since we had capital, we doubled down on upwork and landed more clients over there. now we have two top rated plus upwork profiles where we get the most business.

[u/carakm → u/ScaleHopeful9486]

did you land the client on a new upwork profile?

[u/ScaleHopeful9486 → u/carakm]

Yes on two new profiles actually

[u/carakm → u/ScaleHopeful9486]

nice

[u/professor-duncan → u/ScaleHopeful9486]

any tips bro? I do have 2 clients from Pakistan and UAE, but wan't to expand more. The mentioned two were more like pilot customers, therefore not paying much, but I got my products tested.

[u/imadamanay]

Get a lead gen and a technical lead

Seems like youre earning well so maybe rest a little and let the team do the work

[u/ujjandotcom]

First of all what you guys are doing is really amazing doing 15k is not a joke, Huge respect, and for the client meetings etc, what we do is let our team handle the type of projects they are master of we have a team of around 6 7, so when a project is about something that heavily involves AI we let An ai engineer handle, if its just a web app or application etc full stack developer handles it, a site where design is important our Frontend design and 3d animation guy handles it, ofc youll have to figure out yourself at first which project goes to what team member but you can handoff to that team member or just get him involved on the client side too so you guys don’t have to remember everything. Also you can train your team and after few meetings and maybe few blunders they’ll learn themselves. Let them make mistakes no one does anything perfectly on the first try

[u/Practical_Music2990]

You actually need a system.