10 practical tips for running a fully remote 6-figure online agency
8 years, $1M selling services, and a lot of lessons learnt
Hey friends,
I’ve been providing consulting services as a freelancer and agency owner since October 2017. Since then I’ve worked with over 40 clients in a number of industries (mostly SaaS and DTC eCom) and generated a little over $1M in revenue. In 2021 I launched projectBI, my first agency.
I mention this not to brag but to assure you that the tips I share in the rest of this post come from years fighting in the trenches.
If you’re just getting started on your journey as an entrepreneur, the advice I share in this post will save you years of frustration and a LOT of money.
This is a long post so feel free to jump to the tips which resonate the most with you and skip the rest.
I’ve included 3 bonus tips for my paid subscribers. As always, thanks a ton for your ongoing support.
The tips
Stick to hourly-based “salaries” for as long as possible
Hire sooner
Don’t sweat the small expenses
Leverage cash on hand
Over communicate
Most partnerships are a waste of time
Raise your prices
Reduce banking fees by using Wise
Use Upwork to find new team members quickly
Marketplaces are winner takes most
Bonus #1 for paid subscribers - Use Zapier or n8n to send reminders to team members
Bonus #2 for paid subscribers - Do a deep dive on your P&L at least once a quarter
Bonus #3 for paid subscribers - Leverage what you already have before building
Tip #1 - Stick to hourly-based “salaries” for as long as possible
One of the most expensive mistakes I made when I first transitioned from freelancer to agency owner is paying team members a fixed salary.
I had a belief that if I find someone that is good enough for the business that I need to “lock them down” with a fixed salary.
I think this is a trap, especially when you are first getting started.
There is entire market of freelancers out there that are used to being paid on an hourly basis. Take advantage of this to keep your costs variable in nature instead of fixed. Fixed costs add massive pressure to a business, especially a business with irregular cash flows.
My advice is to find your initial team members via Upwork or an equivalent marketplace and only switch over to paying a fixed salary once your business can afford it.
You’ll know you’re at that point once you are drowning in work and have checked the following boxes:
You’re getting enough leads on a consistent, semi-predictable basis
Clear service-market-fit
You personally are drowning in work and the only clear way forward is for you to delegate account management / service delivery.
Only once the three checkboxes above are checked should you even consider paying a team member a fixed salary.
I think the exception to this rule would be if you are an experienced entrepreneur re-entering a market you are familiar with and want to move quickly.
As long as there is some cash in the bank and a high belief that the business will quickly scale, then I think its fine to hire full-time team members and pay them fixed salaries.
Tip #2 - Hire sooner
I worked as a solopreneur (AKA freelancer) for 4 years before transitioning to the agency model. Only at that point did I start hiring individuals to help me grow the business.
Looking back I should have transitioned much sooner to the agency model and start building a team.
The difference between doing everything yourself and being able to delegate tasks to others is day and night.
A business can’t scale without adding leverage. A freelancer has very little leverage.
By hiring a team, you’re adding the first major type of leverage, labor.
Even though labor is at the bottom of the pyramid, it’s still substantial.
Now of course not every freelancer should transition to the agency model and start hiring a team. It’s very individualistic and it comes down to what you want.
Not everyone can manage people and has the interest to scale. That’s completely fine but if you want more and feel stuck as a freelancer, you’ll need to take the step and start building a team.
My advice: Hire quickly and fire even quicker.
I could write a thousand words on this topic alone but let me try and summarize it for you.
You want to hire quickly. There is no need for hours and hours of interviews, tests and process around finding your initial team members.
Your first hires should be directly involved with service delivery. This means you’re hiring specialists (designers, coders, copy writers, etc). Since you were doing this work up until now you should be able to quickly determine if the individuals you are interviewing have the skills to do the job.
A short 30 minute intro interview to get a feel for the person and share the responsibilities of the role, and another 30 minutes for a test should be enough. Don’t waste your time with references, take home tests, etc. Do everything on the initial call.
Give the person a clear answer within 24 hours.
Once someone has been hired (remember, on an hourly basis first. See tip #1), you want to give them no more than 2-3 weeks to prove themself. Make sure you offer as much support as needed, ask for feedback on process and do your best to help the new hire succeed BUT if things aren’t working out after 2-3 weeks, you need to pull the plug.
I’ve found that the difference between an A player and B and C players is attitude and intelligence. These are two things you can’t affect as a manager. A hire with a good attitude will take advantage of the opportunities you present, go out of their way, take on more responsibility and genuinely try and help push the business forward.
I’ve yet to hire a B or C player that becomes an A player, no matter how much feedback, support and patience I show them. It’s a sad truth but most people never change.
This is why you need to be quick to let people that aren’t meeting your standards go so they can find a job that’s a better fit for them.
Tip #3 - Don’t sweat the small expenses
I’ve met some entrepreneurs that hate to spend money. Every expense is assessed like its a life changing decision.
Trust me, signing up with a new SaaS that costs $50 a month isn’t going to break your business. Yes, these costs do add up but lets look at some numbers.
By the end of July 2025, my agency, projectBI had spend a total of $4.6k for 18 different software services. You can see the breakdown in the screenshot below.
Most of the services listed in the screenshot above my team and I use on a daily basis but its still a lot of services.
$4.6k isn’t a small amount but we need to keep things in perspective. By the end of July the business had generated $152k in revenue. 4.6k / $152k = 3%
Don’t sweat the small expenses and use the extra energy to invest in what matters, climbing to the next way point up entrepreneur mountain.
Tip #4 - Leverage cash on hand
If you’re running a successful agency you’ll end up with a good problem, a business bank account full of cash.
The problem is that cash is just sitting there collecting dust. As the US dollar loses its value and inflation sits higher than the traditional 2%, the more the value of your money deteriates.
Now before I continue I must state that there are things far more important for an agency than optimizing the leverage it gets from its cash on hand but I did want to include this tip for entrepreneurs that are thinking about this problem and aren’t sure what to do.
There is no single best way to leverage cash on hand but you should consider these options if you are sitting with more than 3 months of runway in your business bank account.
Does your bank have a high yield savings account? Wise offers +-3.5% annually on cash you keep in your USD account.
I use Mercury.com for my online banking and even though they don’t offer a high yield account, they do offer a credit card with 1.5% cash back. Once I had enough runway built up to get a credit card I took advantage of this opportunity. Since I have a lot of small recurring costs, I now pay them using the credit card to get 1.5% back and build my credit score.
Does your bank offer stock brokerage services? You could put your extra cash into a low risk index fund such as the S&P where you would earn about 10% before inflation (based on historical performance over the last 80 years).
You could take a more aggressive and risky approach by investing your extra cash in different investment vehicles from real estate to individual stocks, crypto or even the acquisition of semi-passive SaaS.
Instead of keeping a lot of cash on hand, you could pay yourself and your cofounders a higher salary, dividends or bonuses based on profit margin / revenue milestones. This of course isn’t going to generate extra money from your money but there are benefits to pulling out the cash, especially if the business is stable and the founders aren’t looking to reinvest back into the business.
Remember, there is always risk so if you aren’t comfortable with taking on any risk then just keep your money in cash.
Tip #5 - Over communicate
If you’re running a fully remote agency then one of the best things you can do to elevate the work you do for your clients, reduce stress among your team, and improve moral is by over communicating.
I define “over communicate” as sending more messages (or emails) than may seem necessary.
Each member of your team should be encouraged to update each other frequently and find opportunities to communicate more with clients.
You don’t want to get to the point where the amount of messages is getting out of hand. You want to aim for 15 - 20% more than what seems necessary.
Most people under communicate online which leads to too many periods where teammates, clients and managers don’t have the info they should. There is also no downside to over communicating while under communicating can lead to many problems.
If it gets too much for the client, or teammates feel overwhelmed, you’ll receive feedback and can adjust.
Over communicating includes:
Frequent updates on tasks
Frequently updating clients on the progress the team is making on projects
Letting clients know about wins / issues / bottlenecks when they occur, not waiting for the weekly call
Proactively reaching out to clients to share insights and other useful information
Reaching out to clients that still own you info / deliverables or need to schedule a call to move a project forward
Tip #6 - Most partnerships are a waste of time
Over the last 7 years I’ve signed over a dozen contracts with software companies to join their partner program. In most cases this was a waste of time.
There’s definitely benefits to getting closer with the main technology players in your industry, but if you think you can get on a call with a partner manager, sign some paperwork and start receiving leads from said partner, you’re wrong.
Only one company out of all the companies I’ve ever partnered with has ever sent me new business and it was a very atypical situation.
What you’ll quickly find out if you go down the partnership route is that most B2B software companies that create a partnership program do it as part of their lead gen strategy. These tech companies are hoping their partners bring them business, not the other way around.
In exchange for driving new business for these companies, you can often get revenue share, better terms for your clients and other benefits.
Where I think creating a partnership with a technology vendor makes perfect sense is if your work involves implementing the same tools in every project.
For example, at projectBI, my eCom-focused analytics agency, we frequently implement Fivetran for our clients.
Fivetran is an expensive billion dollar software company that offers revenue share to partners. Since projectBI is a partner of Fivetran, we get a small piece of each contract our clients sign with Fivetran. This extra revenue goes straight to the bottomline.
There’s nothing wrong with some extra revenue, especially revenue that you earn by doing little extra work, but it’s important to keep things in perspective. The revenue share Fivetran sends us in each case is about 2 - 3% the lifetime value of our average client. We’re talking about a few hundred dollars to low 4-figures.
I’d much prefer if Fivetran connected me with the occassional eCom business that is looking for help implementing Fivetran. We make $50k - $100k in revenue from each eCom that signs with us.
Unfortunately tech vendors like Fivetran either don’t bother recommending their partners to leads / customers, or recommend the same handful of partners over and over again.
In short, forget the idea of gaining relevant leads from tech partnerships but consider partnerships with relevant tech companies where rev share is an option. A few thousand dollars in rev share for a little extra work is well worth it.
Tip #7 - Raise your prices
When I was first getting started as a freelancer back in 2017 I was brand new to the game of entrepreneurship. This led me to making the mistake of charging my clients based on hours spent working instead of outcomes, and at a low rate of just $30 an hour.
I wouldn’t say I lacked confidence, I just didn’t seem to value the services I offered and thought if I could sell enough hours at $30 an hour, I’d be fine.
Thankfully I quickly learnt that the hourly model is really shitty and as I got some contracts under my belt, I started to raise my prices.
My recommendation is you need to try and maximize your hourly rate but to do so through project-based or retainer-based pricing, not hourly.
Assuming it takes you 3 business days to complete a fixed-scope project that costs your client $2k, we can say that you’re making $2k / 24 hours = $83 an hour.
Now what’s the best way to increase that $83 an hour rate? You can either shorten the time to complete the project or we can charge more. Shortening the time to complete the project is probably doable but there’s a limit to how much quicker we can get.
The easier option is to increase our price.
If we believe clients would pay $4k for the same work, we’ve just doubled our hourly rate.
Be aggressive with raising your prices and if possible, try and move further up market. The bigger the companies you work with, the less price sensitive they will be.
The value a $500M dollar business gets from the work you do might be in the millions of dollars compared to a startup that just reached $1M in annual revenue.
Tip #8 - Reduce banking fees by using Wise
When I first started hiring a team I ran into a bit of a problem.
My first hires were based in India and Spain. The Indian team member wanted to be paid in rupees while the Spanish team member wanted Euros.
The solution was Wise, an amazing fintech company that makes it easy to collect and transfer funds in different currencies with minimal fees.
In an average month I use Wise to pay myself in Israeli shekels, pay teammembers in USD, euro and Indian rupees, and even collect a nice 3.5% APA interest on any extra cash I leave in the account.
I save hundreds of dollars a year thanks to Wise and recommend it to all online businesses.
Tip #9 - Use Upwork to find new team members quickly
I’ve used Upwork a few times to quickly find freelancers to add to my team. I like the fact that Upwork provides a number of powerful filters which can be used to narrow down a list of potential hires.
Let’s say you wanted to hire an analyst based in Mexico (US timezone) or Argentina that spoke English fluently, had experience working with SQL and Tableau, was a competent communicator, and comfortable working remote. How would you find potential candidates?
You could hire a recruiting firm, post job listings on LinkedIn and other jobs boards, and spend god knows how many hours going through resumes trying to narrow down a list of candidates. Or you could use Upwork.
In Upwork you can filter by geography (narrow it down to Mexico and Argentina), by English proficiency, skills (SQL & Tableau), rating and money earned (a lot of money and a high rating indicates proficiency doing the work and that the individual is comfortable working remote).
Upwork can help you narrow down a list of potential candidates that meet your criteria, and then you can create a job listing and invite the individuals to check it out. You can even message the individuals a head of time.
You now might have 2 - 10 potential candidates you can quickly filter through via short video calls.
I’ve used this process to find multiple analysts, and project managers for my agency.
Tip #10 - Marketplaces are winner takes most
When I was first getting started as a freelancer I was fortunate to come across a new marketplace called MeasureMatch. MeasureMatch connected data specialists with businesses that had a specific problem, or set of problems they needed solved.
When I joined MeasureMatch the number of experts on the platform was relatively low and since I was a generalist with a lot of skills I was able to go after a lot of different projects with little competition.
Over the period of a few years I closed more than $60,000 from contracts I won on MeasureMatch.
Each time I won a contract and delivered good work, I got a 5 star review and testimonial which I leveraged in my pitches for new projects. This helped me close projects at a very high rate (around 40%) which was incredible.
There was a lot of luck involved here but I learnt an important lesson. When it comes to marketplaces, a small percentage of the experts will get the majority of the contracts.
There is a lot of risk when it comes to working with a freelancer you don’t know so companies that post jobs are looking for clear signals that the individuals they are engaging with on the marketplace are legit.
A high rating, a lot of completed jobs, and dollars earned are all great signals that help to lower this risk.
The inverse is also true. No reviews, no completed jobs and no money earned are all signals of high risk (even if its not true). This means that if you’re new to a marketplace, you’re going to have a hard time.
The benefits of getting to the top of the hill are massive so don’t give up.
That’s it for the free content in this edition of Coffee + Revelation. Thanks for reading and if you enjoyed this post, do me a favor and hit the button above and share this post on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook so others can find my content.
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