Client onboarding
Welcome email, contract and statement of work, access credentials, kickoff scheduling, project setup, brief collection. Done slightly differently every time.
Agency founders
More capacity,
less admin.
The client work is what the agency was built for. The onboarding checklists, the monthly reports, the invoice reminders and the status emails are what consume the capacity.
At a glance
- Who it fits
- Founder led marketing, PR, design, digital and content agencies
- What it removes
- Onboarding, reporting, billing, new business admin and daily checks
- Where it starts
- The Time Leak Audit, from £950 excluding VAT
- Your time
- Under two hours
The problem
The admin does not just take time.
It takes the right time.
Running a small agency means wearing several hats at once: client work, new business, managing people, and the admin underneath all of it. For most founders the admin does not simply take hours. It takes the hours that should have gone to clients or to growth.
The pattern repeats across marketing, PR, design, digital and content agencies, because the shape of the business is the same. Every client needs onboarding. Every retainer needs a report. Every month needs invoices.
What makes an agency different from a solo consultant is the multiplication. The same admin runs across every client, every team member and every recurring process at the same time.
Founders who reclaim the most time are not the ones who automate every task. They are the ones who stop being the manual alert system for their own business.
Where the time goes
Where agency founders
lose the most capacity
Five areas, and the fifth is the one founders rarely count.
Common candidates in an agency
- Client onboarding triggered by a signed contract
- Monthly report drafts generated from project data
- Invoice creation and payment chasing sequences
- Proposal and scope templates with client fields filled in
- Project status updates sent on schedule
- New client brief collection and filing
- Post project testimonial and feedback requests
- Capacity alerts when client volumes change
- Exception only alerts replacing daily manual checks
- A weekly management digest instead of manual pulls
The arithmetic
Why it compounds in an agency
A founder managing eight retainer clients, each needing a monthly report and regular billing, has a different problem from a solo consultant with three clients. It is the same tasks multiplied, running in parallel.
Founders usually underestimate it because it is scattered across the week: a report here, a proposal there, an invoice in the evening. Added up over a month it is often close to a full working week of capacity that could have been client time.
The fix is high leverage for the same reason. The cost of building an onboarding process once is spread across every client who is onboarded afterwards. A reporting template built once produces every future report.
The founder level checks deserve their own mention. The answer is not to automate the judgement call. It is to define the threshold once, how late is late and how stale is stale, and let an alert fire only when it is crossed. You stop checking everything and start being told what actually needs you.
≈12 → <1hours of admin in a busy month, at a payroll firm serving around 200 client companies
Premium Paye
Invoicing rebuilt by hand, direct debits keyed one client at a time, paperwork chased by email. Three connected processes took the manual work out of the month.
Read the case studyHow it works
Three paid phases.
You decide after each one.
Each phase has its own deliverables and its own fixed fee, so you always know what you are buying before you buy the next thing.
Time Leak Audit
I map how the work happens today, estimate the hours that could be recovered and rank the opportunities against your goals. Under two hours of your time.
From £950 · fixed fee · excluding VATProcess Design
A working session with your team, then detailed mapping: the steps, the data, the business rules and the exceptions that decide how the build behaves.
Separately scoped · fixed fee · excluding VATImplementation and handover
I build it in the tools you already use, test it against the agreed scenarios, document it and show your team how to run it without me.
Fixed project price · quoted after Process DesignBefore any of it, a free fifteen minute conversation. Bring the process as it actually happens, not as it should.
Before we talk
What agency founders ask
before starting.
These come up on almost every first call.
Where should we start?
Almost always with the highest volume, most consistent process. For most agencies that is either onboarding or monthly reporting, whichever is causing the most friction right now.
The Audit decides it with numbers rather than instinct: which processes repeat most, how long they actually take, and what they cost across the team in a year.
Do we have to change tools?
I work with the tools you already use rather than replacing them. What automation does need is a connector platform to run the processes, such as Make or Zapier, and any AI steps run on a subscription such as Claude or ChatGPT. These are modest monthly costs, you own the accounts, and I set out exactly what is needed and what it costs in the Audit, so nothing is a surprise later.
Will this take work away from my team?
It takes the work nobody wants off them. The admin that gets removed is the work that repeats identically for every client, which is rarely the work anyone was hired to do.
How do we know the problem is big enough to be worth fixing?
The free fifteen minute review answers that without any commitment. Tell me how your week works and I will tell you whether there is a leak worth fixing.
Keep reading
Related
Your business
Reclaim a day a month,
then two.
Tell me what your agency’s admin actually looks like and I will tell you where the capacity is leaking and what fixing it is worth.
15 minutes · No charge
Prefer to write? [email protected]