It depends on what you’re delivering. If your retainer work is low‑time, like 30 minutes of website maintenance per month, you could have many clients. To scale beyond ten, focus on retainer deliverables that have little internal production cost—e.g., monthly reports, Loom video breakdowns, or limited Slack availability a few hours a day. This creates leverage and arbitrage between the time you put in and the perceived value, keeping you profitable.
I don't actually receive anywhere near 70 inbound leads a week — more like one qualified, interested party per business day, so roughly 20-30 a month. But to the real question: yes, I am leaving some money on the table, but it's a time allocation issue. The real question isn't 'aren't you leaving money on the table,' it's whether the money I'd make scaling agency services is more than what I'd make spending that same time and energy on content instead. Agencies are great, but there's a gap in money-per-unit-time between running an agency and producing an info product. I do enjoy service implementation and fulfillment, but it's a lot more delicate and fragile as a revenue stream — every new project is a fresh opportunity to screw something up, and you have to maintain quality on every retainer. Content, by contrast, is something I can consistently produce and that just exists afterward, compounding without needing ongoing maintenance the way agency service quality does.
I run the agency with zero employees. I prefer contractors over employees because with contractors I just give them the work and a deadline, without managing their hours or schedule. Employees require a set schedule, clock‑in/out, and more regulations. Contractors have more flexibility, fewer legal constraints, and I can hire fantastic people who have their own systems. I give them a deliverable request, like “I need this done in two days, I’ll pay X amount,” and they deliver. Currently I have a YouTube editor, a strategist, a community manager, an agency partner who gets a percentage of projects, and previously a VA. This lean contractor model lets me move faster and focus on high‑margin direct work rather than scaling the agency.
You run an ops agency that helps agency owners increase capacity without hurting their team or client experience. You mentioned a PF model for three‑ or four‑month programs, which sounds like a public‑investment‑fund structure, but you actually run standard retainers. My take on why you opted for retainers: they give predictable cash flow and align incentives because you take payment upfront—100 % paid in full before the retainer period starts—so both you and the client are on the same page. For example, if you charge $120 an hour and a client like Fluxate pays you for 20 hours a month, that’s $2,400 per month.
If your goal is to scale to seven‑ or eight‑figure monthly revenue, first consider what you're selling. Moving into enterprise with large, intimately scoped contracts often means custom software development and would require scaling the team far beyond nine people, bringing a whole different set of problems I don't enjoy. Instead, I recommend what every lean agency does at the million‑dollar‑a‑month mark: productize the hell out of your offer—think Fat Joe level productization where fulfillment cost is near zero and you charge based on outcomes like placements or deliverables. For example, an old client of mine productized SEO to the point where you just order a $7,755 campaign on their platform with zero fulfillment cost. For your specific model—$10K up front and $35K over six months (about $4‑$6K monthly plus upsells)—you could increase the monthly retainer to $5‑$8K and average $60‑$70K per client. Also, consider niching down: sell outcomes, not the systems, and use automation just to deliver those outcomes (e.g., a cold‑email agency enabled by automation). As an unofficial note, Lewin’s white‑label GHL approach is a massive revenue ad with little effort, but I prefer to focus on creating high‑quality content rather than pushing software on everyone.