Your agency.
Their agencies.
One room.
Where boutique agency owners trade war stories, ops playbooks, and the client horror stories they can't post on LinkedIn.
What the neighborhood
is talking about.
Client ghosted on $40K retainer — what's your collections playbook?
Three months of deliverables, two invoice emails, complete radio silence. Lawyer says small claims isn't worth it at this amount. Has anyone actually recovered money from a ghosted client?
The ops doc that finally made payroll feel boring
After 6 years of payroll anxiety every second Friday, we standardized everything into one Notion doc. Sharing the full template inside.
SOW clause that saved us from a $22K scope creep situation
Client kept adding "small asks." By month 3 we were doing double the work. One clause change fixed this for every contract after.
Burned out at 8 people — what team size actually works?
I thought scaling from 4 to 8 would make things easier. It made everything louder. Looking for agency owners who found their sweet spot.
First hire went sideways — here's what I'd do differently
The job description was fine. The onboarding was the problem. 90 days in and I realized I'd set them up to fail from day one.
Anyone else deploy on Fridays? (Yes, I know.)
Our own rule says no Friday deploys. We broke it twice this month. Both went fine. I'm starting to think the rule is superstition.
Raising rates without losing clients — exact email I sent
Went from $85/hr to $145/hr over 18 months. 3 clients didn't renew. The other 11 stayed. Here's the exact language I used.
Performance marketing shop: how we track attribution across 14 clients
Spreadsheets broke around client 6. Looker Studio was overkill. Here's the middle-ground setup that actually works.
How I finally got off the tools at year 4
I was still writing code for clients at year 4. The thing that changed it wasn't hiring — it was a conversation I had to have with myself.
Client ghosted on $40K retainer — what's your collections playbook?
Three months of deliverables, two invoice emails, complete radio silence. Lawyer says small claims isn't worth it at this amount. Has anyone actually recovered money from a ghosted client?
The ops doc that finally made payroll feel boring
After 6 years of payroll anxiety every second Friday, we standardized everything into one Notion doc. Sharing the full template inside.
Burned out at 8 people — what team size actually works?
I thought scaling from 4 to 8 would make things easier. It made everything louder. Looking for agency owners who found their sweet spot.
First hire went sideways — here's what I'd do differently
The job description was fine. The onboarding was the problem. 90 days in and I realized I'd set them up to fail from day one.
Raising rates without losing clients — exact email I sent
Went from $85/hr to $145/hr over 18 months. 3 clients didn't renew. The other 11 stayed. Here's the exact language I used.
The chairs
already filled.

"We tripled our retainer rate after I stopped apologizing for our prices. This forum is where I found the nerve."

"I posted about my first bad hire at 11pm on a Tuesday. By morning, 34 people had replied with exactly what I needed to hear."

"The thread on payroll systems saved me probably 6 hours a month. That's a real client deliverable I get back."

"I came here because I was tired of asking questions on Reddit and getting answers from people who've never run anything."

"Nobody warned me that going from 4 to 8 people would feel like a completely different job. This room warned me."

"The pricing thread alone justified the time I spend here. I raised my ROAS reporting fee by $800/month after reading it."
"We still deploy on Fridays. My thread about it has 142 replies. Most of them are also deploying on Fridays."

"We tripled our retainer rate after I stopped apologizing for our prices. This forum is where I found the nerve."

"I posted about my first bad hire at 11pm on a Tuesday. By morning, 34 people had replied with exactly what I needed to hear."

"The thread on payroll systems saved me probably 6 hours a month. That's a real client deliverable I get back."

"I came here because I was tired of asking questions on Reddit and getting answers from people who've never run anything."

"Nobody warned me that going from 4 to 8 people would feel like a completely different job. This room warned me."

"The pricing thread alone justified the time I spend here. I raised my ROAS reporting fee by $800/month after reading it."
"We still deploy on Fridays. My thread about it has 142 replies. Most of them are also deploying on Fridays."
Every block
has its regulars.
Operations
Payroll, project management, process docs, tooling, and the systems that keep everything from catching fire.
The ops doc that finally made payroll feel boring
by Jordan WebbPricing
Rate cards, proposal strategy, value-based pricing, and raising your prices without losing the clients you want to keep.
Raising rates without losing clients — exact email I sent
by Dani KowalskiClient Management
Scope creep, ghosting, contracts, difficult conversations, and the clients who make great case studies.
SOW clause that saved us from a $22K scope creep
by Dev PatelHiring
First hires, contractors vs employees, onboarding disasters, and building a team that doesn't need you in every meeting.
First hire went sideways — here's what I'd do differently
by Priya SharmaMental Health
Burnout, founder isolation, the Sunday scaries, and what it actually feels like to run something that depends on you.
Burned out at 8 people — what team size actually works?
by Tomás RiveraYou'll want to reply to these.
Four threads from this week. Real conversations. The kind that make you want to pull up a chair.
How I fired a client who was 40% of our revenue (and survived)
Everyone said don't do it. Here's how I planned the transition, found the replacement, and came out the other side with better margins...
The exact Notion system I use to run a 12-person agency solo
No project manager. No ops hire. Just me, Notion, and these three templates. Sharing everything inside this thread...
Performance agency owners: what's your actual margin on retainers?
Let's be honest with each other. I'll go first: our blended margin on retainer work is 34%. Is that good? Bad? I genuinely don't know...
I almost quit in year 3. Here's what stopped me.
This isn't a motivational post. It's a practical one. The specific thing that shifted wasn't mindset. It was a spreadsheet...
Read the full threads
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