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My small agency has done $650k+ in revenue in 2.5 years, but I am feeling burnt out and wanna exit. Am I being impatient? (alien.top)

submitted 1 year ago by imhashir@alien.top to c/entrepreneur@indiehackers.space

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I always wanted to build a software development agency. I have a team of 25+ people, having a stable Upwork Agency profile with the revenue I mentioned above, but I am having a hard time scaling the sales more.

I know if any other US or European agency Acquires us, they'll have the benefit of getting cheaper labour, having a team which is well trained in talking to clients, closing leads and delivering projects. Plus I have rented and furnished a whole physical office where people come on daily basis to work. So they can have it all.

With the client base they can find in US and even with our already well reputed Upwork profile, they'll be able to secure a lot more projects.

You ask, why won't you be able to secure more projects if the profile is that good? Because it's a Pakistani profile. Not sure how unaware you are from reality, but there exists a certain bias towards India/Pakistan/Bangladesh/Nepal. They'll create their individual US/EU profiles and be added to Agency as owners, and it'll become a US profile, Top Rated Plus, Expert Vetted, with all good reviews.

What should I do? Should I find someone to acquire? Will anyone be interested in acquiring us and for how much?

Another fact, we have been profitable for every month. The cost is hardly $10k-$18k per month and the revenue per month ranges from $23k-$35k, and that's in the time when there's a lot of news of recession.

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[–] mayurdotca@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Looking at your comments - you are running too close to breakeven. Thats too lean. Either double your rates, or half your staff.

You should be aiming for at least a 30% profit so that you can put 10% back into emergency fund, and 5% into company growth - marketing, employee benefits, parties, etc. The last 15% is your ice cream.

UPDATE: Looks your staff are sitting around. No bueno. You should have a 100 item list of things people can do when there isn't work. Make tiktoks, publish a blog post, etc etc. Ideally your team should be so busy that people have to wait to become your customer cause you can't take on any more.

Upwork is great but its also terrible for long-term reliability. Main ongoing work should be from existing customers - work hardest on this. Next work hardest on building an excellent brand and site and then find joint venture partners - guys like me that do product, leadership circles, designers. Then #3 is other platforms for work. Then government. Then SEO, etc.

[–] imhashir@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I am totally against the approach of occupying your team on in house products/projects. It just makes it look like the team is busy and you are doing a lot of work, when in fact, they are just busy on things which are not generating any revenue at all.
I keep the team members who are free, occupied on different trainings, but not on in-house products, except for a few times. I wanna make sure we are not dividing our attention on things which are not generating revenue for us.
About reducing the team size or doubling my rates, answered that a few times already in the thread, but if anyone doesn't find that and need an answer for that, let me know and I'll edit this one

[–] mayurdotca@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Points taken. I think generally speaking when you have "bandwidth" in house there are tonnes of things your team may like/want to work on vs you wanting to keep them busy. Not everything has to be revenue generating. There are adjacent activities like contributing to open source, hosting meetups, helping non-profits, etc. Lots of things that look time wasting but have the end result of helping you win new business.

Maybe ask your team what would they like to work on during off peak times and see what they say. There might be a SAAS app sitting on the shelf that some of your team might love working on that could later become a huge business (eg: gmail for google)

[–] imhashir@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Agreed. I have started encouraging people to do personal branding, write blogs and improve our company website. We have done some events in the past, and planning to start doing that again soon.

As for the SaaS, it's one thing stuck in my mind for a long time now and I have started worked on it. This might be a direction we'll start taking our team towards.

Really appreciate the thoughtful response 🙌🏼

[–] mayurdotca@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Cool. One thing to pivot them from working on their own stuff vs stuff that gives you skin in the game is offering them to work offpeak on some startup idea in house. Make a list of 20 things. If it takes off, share the spoils with the founder(s) and spin it off. Track using slicingpie.com. Could be anything from an info product to a full saas.

Basically incentivizing company benefitting activities vs "do anything you like" stuff. They will all end up doing Tiktok videos if you let them decide lol.