I have a strong freelancer account with solid earnings, five stars, top rated. I also set up an agency account earlier this year but haven't pursued any jobs through it, so it has zero earnings and zero reviews. I'm transparent about my structure and only apply to jobs that are a correct fit. What's the best way to land those first agency clients? Should I keep applying through my freelancer profiles and move clients to the agency account where it makes sense, or should I apply directly through the agency account despite the empty history?
No, you should continue applying your freelancer account and you should move clients over to the agency account only where it makes sense. Agency accounts are typically much lower converting. They have lower view rates, lower reply rates, much lower booked meeting rates, uh, and are just significantly harder across the entire stack. And you get virtually zero payoff for that as well. Unfortunately, it's Upwork trying to fill the obvious kind of question, which is like, what if the freelancer I hire just contracts work out? You know, we need to give them a quote unquote legitimate path to doing so. Unfortunately, it just does not work in practice because when somebody makes a job post on Upwork, they want to work with the person that applied and they want to see a face. You know, it's the people that they're looking for uh and who they can readily assess the quality of. Agencies are just one additional barrier because you're communicating with a faceless sort of company and then that company could pass you off to one of very many, you know, account managers and vendors and stuff like that. So, there's no benefit to positioning or pitching yourself as an agency basically whatsoever. Um, I would not do this. I would always pitch as you. I would then amass as many points, earnings, stars, whatever the hell JSS on your profile as possible. And then, you know, if you wanted to get a few reviews in the agency profile, you could do so. [sighs and gasps]
Most clients on Upwork don’t want to work with agencies. I recommend not using Upwork as a primary agency growth channel; treat it as a way to get an initial foothold while you’re still freelancing. When you’re selling yourself, you want the client to feel they’re hiring you, not an agency. Avoid agency language on your profile—use “founder” if you like, and bring up any consultants only during calls after you’ve secured the project. Start as a freelancer, deliver a high‑quality first project, get a great review, then gradually introduce others or a consultant on later projects. Don’t say you’ll hand the work off to an agency; keep the work yourself initially. In short, don’t label yourself as an agency on Upwork—position yourself as an automation specialist or similar, because Upwork users dislike the word “agency.”
I've owned a few profitable indoor mini golf businesses for three years and even attended some Los Vegas trainings with Horos's team to help grow them, but I'm a bit burnt out on brick and mortar and love the idea of running a one-man business, though I'm struggling to decide on an angle. Yeah, well said. So, if I had to start over with no agency knowledge, only my foundational business knowledge, what would I do? I'd definitely go back into agency work, even without any agency experience, because it's the quickest zero-to-one path for me. It's less important to get things perfect right away and more important to pick something quickly and then evolve alongside it. So I'd pick an agency model. My foundational business experience would help, but whether I had zero or a ton of experience, I'd still go into agencies. The only thing that might change that answer is distribution—if I had a large following and network, I might consider something else. But assuming I'm starting with no leverage, no distribution, no money, and just what's in my head, I'd absolutely start delivering services to clients, get a return on my time, use that to bootstrap my operations, grow them, and then be in a more financially privileged position with knowledge and experience in whatever niche I ended up picking. Hopefully that makes sense. Yeah, I'd start there and work my way down.
The biggest one-time contract I sold was mid $220,000 for a project I called 'Uber for lumpers'—a system connecting companies needing lumpers (people who load/unload ships) with lumper workers. My business partner and I built it, but it was a total pain and not worth the time; it was one of the first projects we sold, so I took on custom work, but I don't recommend doing custom projects more than a couple times early on because there's little ROI on your time—my hourly rate is about $50. After that, I did a proposal generator system project that paid $1,500 and took only about 5–10 minutes to fulfill (plus ~30 minutes selling and a 30‑minute kickoff call). That gave a huge return on investment and unlocked the leverage idea: I could either make $225,000 in month‑one revenue from a big custom project, or I could create templates and sell the need, then spend five minutes copying a template I already built. Regarding agency requests, I get about 10 genuine agency inquiries per month; most want to invest $15K–$20K and work with me on a three‑month subscription at $5,900/month ($17,700 up front). I haven’t finalized my agency dynamics yet. The businesses that reach out most are high‑earning industries: fintech, software, financing/investing (e.g., underwriting firms that need automated financial data and email replies), and companies installing power grids that take a cut of hundred‑million‑dollar projects. My agency currently makes about $25,000 a month; from the $128,000 profit I mentioned, that’s roughly 20% of my income. Monthly profit isn’t the only metric—enterprise value matters. Info products are hard to sell because they’re tied to me; agencies have low multiples, whereas a SaaS product can achieve much higher multiples. I’m therefore building templates and done‑for‑you services, continuing to scale the agency for enterprise value and to stay connected to what I teach, because in coaching, when a system works, people often abandon it to teach it, which makes it outdated. I want to avoid that.
biggest contractuber for lumpersproposal generatoragency
If I ran a marketing agency for solar installers in Europe that handled ads, speed-to-lead systems, and included a CRM like GHL, I would first and foremost cut all of my lowest performing services. If I'm doing ads, speed-to-lead, and offering CRM services, that's three things. I would identify the one out of those three that generates a disproportionate share of my income — and the reality is that is almost always the case: one of your many services in a general, non-differentiated agency will give most of your results. I would cut the other two and only do that one thing. In your case, if you're handling ads and ads are where most of the money is coming from, I would just double down into ads. I would stop offering my CRM and all my general marketing services — I would just do ads all day. If it was my CRM that people really liked me for and tended to pay me money for, then I would just double down on my CRM. Then I would stop being a general solar marketing business and become, say, a PPC growth agency for solar businesses. If that was the main growth lever, immediately by doing that I'd probably be able to double my prices. Not only would I be able to double my prices, but I'd also be able to significantly improve my unit efficiency, because now I'm just doing the same thing over and over every single day. I'm not spreading and diversifying my time, energy, and staff member hours across a bunch of different services that don't stack gains as well. If you do ads all day and you turn ads into its constituent two or three parts — the creative, the copy, maybe the strategy, or the media buying — you get really good at that really fast. When you get really good at something really fast, you're able to guarantee and offer better results. And when you're able to guarantee and offer better results, you're able to charge more money for those results. That is the flywheel I would jump on in this case.