Case Study: How I Transformed

Harsh's Agency and Saved Them

$104,000 Per Year in Just 11 Hours with
a Brand New System
Hey, it’s Daniel here, and in this document, I’ll show you exactly how I
launched Harsh’s agency system from scratch to save him $104,000+ per
year at the time of writing.

Stop everything you’re doing. Close all tabs and pay close attention. If you
have an agency and follow this exact formula, you’ll be able to create
similar (or bigger) results for yourself.

Now before we get to the case study, I’ll show you some proof of the
statement above, so you can know from Harsh I actually did this.

At the end of our business together I asked him the following question:

Being conservative at a rate of $200/h (which is nothing for a CEO of an

agency like him), he’s now saving $104k per year EVERY YEAR.
Here’s Harsh, the CEO of Qualtivate, a Quality Management System
agency that helps businesses in the healthcare industry build their own
QMS.

Now, let me tell you who this document is for:

● If you have an agency and you’re starting to feel overwhelmed by the

amount of work, this is for you.

● If you have an agency and want to give a better experience to your

customers to then drive more referrals, this is for you.

● If you have an agency and need extra time to focus on the business
and not only on the day-to-day, this is for you.

● If you have an agency and want to hire, this is for you.

 ● If you have an agency and you keep doing the same thing for your
customers over and over, this is for you.

Let me also tell you who this document is NOT for:

● If you’re thinking of starting an agency but haven’t started yet, this is

not for you

● If you don’t care about growing and scaling the agency you have, this
is not for you

● If you’re not willing to spend time optimizing your business, this is not
for you

Now here’s the truth…

You can have a $25k+/mo agency and still be a one-man show with the
right system by your side.

However, most people start hiring too soon because they think it’s the only
way to grow, which in fact reduces their margins and increases the time
they spend managing other people.

This happens because we’re taught to think short term.

But you cannot scale an agency ONLY by hiring.

I’ll show you here exactly what you need to do first so you can scale a
healthy agency and get past $100k/mo and beyond.

In case you don’t know me, I’m Daniel Canosa and since 2020 I have been
helping businesses scale healthily by implementing systems and
automation.

But before that, I was working at a company myself as an employee and

saw how messy their operations were and the amount of money they were
wasting every month on useless hires to make up for their lack of systems
and automation.
I left that company knowing how hurtful this was for them (in fact, they went
out of business 1 year after I left) and was determined to save other
companies from having to go through the same experience.

In July 2022 I met Harsh.

He had a lot of experience with what he did (10 years building QMS for
companies) and had just started his solo venture with his agency
Qualtivate.

He told me he wanted to scale his agency and wanted to focus on

delivering an outstanding service to their clients to keep growing his
clientele and reduce the time he spent per client.

So we decided to work together and join the know-how of his industry with
mine of systems and automation.

Since the beginning, I knew this was a win-win partnership since he already
knew what he wanted to build (he’s got the experience) and I knew how to
build what he wanted.

My prediction worked so well that after only 11 hours working together he

had a fully automated onboarding experience for his clients, a client portal
so each of his clients could see all the info and docs related to their project
with Harsh, and a system that will allow him to hire fast if he needs to,

Now, I have good news for you…

Every Agency Is The Same

With this, I mean that every agency is the same “operationally”.

Every agency I’ve worked with needed:

1. A lead-capturing system
 2. A lead management system (and a system to reach out to close more
deals)

3. A customer management system

4. A way to manage the team’s internal tasks (for service fulfillment)

5. Client portals (to show the client their project’s progress) - Optional

6. An SOP management system

If you think about it, every agency business needs these 6 operational
areas, plus sometimes a finances tracker, although some agencies have
specific software for that.

As you can see, every piece influences the next one.

How?

Here are a few examples:

“Without capturing leads (1) we can’t have any leads to manage (2)”

“Without a lead management system (2) we won’t have customers to

manage (3)”

“Without customers (3) we won’t have tasks to manage (4) nor client
portals (5) to show clients what’s going on”

“Without clients (1-5) we won’t really need an SOP management system (6)
since we don’t have the scale so that creating SOPs becomes high
leverage”

Now that you understand the importance of having systems to help your
agency fulfill services and scale, let’s see how I did it for Harsh’s agency
following the formula.
The Workflow Formula
With every client I follow the same formula.

The Workflow Formula

It’s a very basic way of discovering the needs of every particular agency
and what’s good about it is that it’s always the same, so you can follow it
too for your own agency.

This is how The Workflow Formula works.

We follow the customer journey from the very first interaction we have
with him/her until the very end of the service fulfillment.

As we follow the journey in chronological order we build the systems we’re

going to need at every step.

The keyword here is need. Doing things this way will help us focus ONLY
on building the things we need.

And by doing it this way, we will also be able to place everything in the right
places (better system UX) because we know at which point in time we’re
going to be needing everything.

So let’s follow the steps for Harsh’s agency.

1 - Lead capturing
Every agency starts at the same point, by capturing leads so we can then
follow up on them and close deals.

Harsh is heavily focused on LinkedIn and he has his Calendly link at the
forefront of his profile.
I do the same for my agency.

Typically all agency work starts with an exploratory call to see if both
parties are the right fit.

We wanted to bring these leads automatically to our Notion system along

with the qualification questions Harsh decided to have in his Calendly.

We used Make.com as the automation tool of choice.

This need already told us we need a database to host customer data.

It is good practice to host all databases on the same page, so that’s what
we started doing.
For Harsh, every new client is a project, so it’s in the projects database
where we’ll be hosting the client information.

Once the database was created we could start to build the automation that
would bring every new lead to our Notion system.
2 and 3 - Lead and Customer Management
Now that the lead is within our database, following the lead flow, the next
step is having an introductory call with them, so we’d need a place to take
notes.

Harsh uses Otter.ai to get the call transcriptions so we created a place

where he could store those notes within each project entry (in Notion every
entry is also a page we can write in).

This is not the typical approach btw.

I normally take notes directly on the project’s page, but Harsh feels more
comfortable storing searchable transcripts instead of call notes, so we did it
his way.

So far we had a couple of statuses for each lead.

And a place to hold the call transcripts inside each potential client’s record.
We continued the same process, following the leads’ workflow, to create
the rest of the steps.

The most important thing to take into account is that for every lead status
there should be a unique action or step that moves the lead from step A to
step B.

If there’s more than one, at the moment we wanna scale this system to
having employees or contractors it will cost us mistakes and confusion.

We wanna build something that’s scalable from the get-go.

We continued this process, where I was asking Harsh about every single
action he took with his clients, and then we defined the steps that defined
every step of the process.

These were the status we came up with.

At this point, you see how important it is to follow The Workflow Formula.

It is vital to find the real needs so we can then build around them.

Now, here’s what most people do:

- Go to YouTube and try to find how someone else is building his

system
- Buy their Notion template
- Try to brute force their business into that template
 - Find out the template has too many things they won’t use and feel
overwhelmed by the fact that now they have to edit a finished
template and don’t know where to start.
- Leave the template altogether and continue running the biz as they
were.
- They keep running an ineffective business, losing deals, and not
being able to scale.

I’ve seen this over and over with all businesses that come to me for help.

It doesn’t work.

Why?

Because probably you don’t even know your business needs.

You haven’t thought about systemizing what you do and you’re hoping
others will hand you your systemized business.

As a result, you can’t get past the $20k/mo mark because you’re wasting a
ton of time on stuff that could be automated/systemized and losing deals
because you hope you’ll remember to follow up with potential customers.

4 - Internal Tasks
Once we get the lead and customer management system dialed in, we
need to have a way to manage the tasks that are related to each of the
clients.
Harsh just needed a lean way to manage his tasks, so we didn’t go
overboard and built a very simple database for the job.
What was more interesting was the way that we wanted the tasks to be
shown.

Harsh’s plan was to scale his agency so part of the client work will be
handled by others in the future.

If Harsh wants to delegate and make it clear to his hires what they need to
do, we should build something scalable to facilitate that.

Once again, we start from a need Harsh has, and then build a solution to
the need.

For that, we built a personal dashboard template.

What is this, you may ask?

This template generates a dashboard specific to a person with one

click for each person in the company.

Now, whenever Harsh starts hiring, he can use this template to provide new
hires with a dashboard to manage their assigned projects and tasks.

Can you see how simple it will be now for Harsh to hire people and get
them up to speed?

How did we pull this off?

Allow me to be a bit technical here.

We have a database that is meant to have one record per employee. We

called it Dashboards.

So we created a database template within the Dashboards database.

Then we created some linked databases with self-referencing filters

(filtering the name of the template) so every time we run the template, the
data shown here is all data related to the current page.

Toning down a bit the technicalities, if we run the template in what we want
to be Harsh’s dashboard, the databases shown in the dashboard will just
show those records where Harsh appears as the assignee (e.g. his tasks,
his projects, his meetings… etc)

Since Harsh’s is a service-based business and we are managing

everything related to his clients in Notion, could we also use Notion to show
his clients what’s going on in their projects in real-time?

Ofc we can.

This is step number 5.

5 - Client portals
By defining what we wanted to show in the client portal we discovered a lot
of new things we needed to build.

The best way to define is to simply open a notepad and to make a list of
things we wanted to show his clients.

Here’s what we came up with.

Separating the definition and the implementation makes it so much easier
to then build it, as we just have to build the different databases that are
going to hold the data we wanna show.

And this is what we did next. Here are all the databases we built.
For each new database, we always followed the same process, which is
me asking Harsh which properties he needs and me making Harsh
double-think whether we really needed that property or not.

Why do I do this?

We often over-engineer our systems with unnecessary metadata, which

only serves to make the system more difficult to maintain.

So by making Harsh double-think every new property, we make sure we’re

just letting useful data come into the system.

By following our portal definition and having the databases ready, we only
needed to build the portal as Harsh want his clients to experience it.

The way to build it was very similar to what we did to build the internal
personal dashboards, but with more views and ways to display the data.

In this portal we’re showing:

- Projects
- Tasks
- Meetings
- All types of documents (project-related, invoices, contracts,
proposals…)
Now, imagine being Harsh’s client.

You no longer need to ask him how your project is doing because he has
given you your own dashboard where you can check it in real time.

No need to search your emails for a document, you have them all in your
dashboard.

Harsh is sure this customer experience will bring in more business,

something we hadn't considered when titling this document but that’ll make
him more money in the future.

6 - SOP Management
Every company that aspires to scale needs SOPs.

SOP stands for Standard Operating Procedures.

These are basically documents where we explain how to do a particular

thing and all the resources needed for doing this particular thing.

For example “How to onboard a client” can be an SOP.

And within this document, we would find the step by step we need to follow
every time we need to onboard a client after they’ve paid.

For example:

- Send the invoice (click here)

- Write them a welcome email
- [copy]
- Set up a Google Drive folder for sharing assets (click here to create
one)

And so on…

In Harsh’s case, we already had a Documents database, so we ended up

using this database and just having a tag to distinguish SOPs from other
types of documents.
The reason we did this was to reduce the number of databases we have
running the whole show.

The more databases, the messier the system is gonna get in the long run
and the hardest it is to maintain.

The only thing to set up here would be an SOP template, so all the SOPs
have the same structure.

If you’re new to SOPs, you can start from this structure and add or remove
as you need:

- Purpose
- Scope
- Responsibilities
- Definitions
- References
- Tools
- Procedure
- Attachments
- Revision history

Some SOPs are going to be visible to the client and some are going to be
internal, which can be done easily by applying the appropriate filters to the
Client Portal and the SOP internal page.

This system was built in 11 hours of Harsh and me working together.

It is going to allow him to save the salary he would’ve needed to pay if he

would’ve needed to hire a VA to do everything the system now does for
practically no cost.

So that’s basically it.

Now that you understand exactly how the workflow process works, I have
an offer for you.
If you’re a:

- Coach
- Agency owner
- Consultant

And you want to provide an exceptional experience to your customers, be

able to scale your business, hire others, automate processes and save a
minimum of one salary every year,

I’ll do this entire process for you.

OR

I can show you how to do all of the above so you can implement the
process yourself.

If that sounds like something you’d have interest in, book a call here, and
let’s have a chat.

Speak soon.

Daniel, founder of systemify.