Built for: Owners of marketing agencies doing $5M to $20M a year that run paid media for clients and run the shop on Teamwork, QuickBooks, Gusto and HubSpot.
What it answers: How big the agency really is once clients' media is taken out, which clients and service lines carry it, whether the media float is a cash risk, whether to hire ahead of the pipeline, and what a buyer would pay.
See it live: Marketing agency demo · a made-up company with invented numbers
The call usually starts the same way. Someone who buys agencies asks the owner what they did last year, and the owner reads the top line off the P&L. On a full-service shop that runs paid media, that number is mostly other people's money. The buyer knows it. The owner often hasn't done the arithmetic.
Here's how I'd walk an owner through it, using a sample dashboard we built for a made-up agency called Tansley Reed. It does strategy, creative, SEO, social and paid media for 22 clients with 74 people. It logs every hour in Teamwork Projects, takes client requests in Teamwork Desk, keeps its books in QuickBooks, runs payroll in Gusto and tracks new business in HubSpot.
QuickBooks says Tansley Reed did $17.9M in the last 12 months. About $6.1M of that was clients' Google Ads, Meta and other platform spend billed at cost, and another $0.5M was production and influencer fees passed straight through. The agency's own income, its AGI, was $11.3M, up about a fifth. After payroll, freelancers, rent and software it kept $1.8M.
Two numbers tell a buyer more than the top line. AGI per head is about $157K, at the low end of the range most people would call healthy. Payroll takes 64% of every AGI dollar, where 55 to 60% is more typical. Both point at the same thing, and Teamwork shows what it is.
Every month the Teamwork time cards post each person's cost, from Gusto, to the client and project in QuickBooks through the API. So margin by client comes straight out of the books, and nobody rebuilds it in a spreadsheet.
Creative and social keep about 72 cents of each AGI dollar. Paid media keeps 29. Its fees are set as a share of spend, and the team runs at 91% of its available hours. The creative team, meanwhile, has been on client work only about 56% of its hours since a large rebrand ended in March.
Then the client view. Vessimer Fitness is 18% of AGI, the agency's biggest account and its biggest media spender. It keeps 42 cents of each dollar. The rest of the book keeps 64. The team logged about 10 hours for every $1,000 Vessimer paid, against about 6 for everyone else. Teamwork Desk shows 849 requests from them this year, about a third outside the scope of work.
The fix is a priced change-order menu before the January plan goes out. Open the thread on Vessimer's row and the owner's note lands on the Vessimer task in Teamwork, where the account director answers it. Nobody copies anything between systems.
Google and Meta bill on fixed dates. Most of Tansley Reed's media clients are billed after the month the media runs, and Vessimer pays on net 45. Early this year Vessimer moved to a new payables system and January's and February's media went about two months late. By the end of April the agency had fronted about $920K of clients' media, $740K of it Vessimer's, and drew $670K on its line of credit to cover it.
The pay-when-paid schedule ties every open payable to the client invoice that funds it. The account team sees the invoice in QuickBooks and the producer sees the bill on the same Teamwork project. Since January, vendor bills wait for the client's cash. Platform bills can't wait, so the real fix is billing media before it runs. On the plan that takes the worst month-end down by about $260K. With Vessimer 60 days late again, it's the difference between drawing about $380K on the line and drawing nothing.
Teamwork hours against Gusto's roster show a lopsided team. Weighted by stage, the HubSpot pipeline adds about $1M of AGI next year, a third of it paid media. By spring paid media needs about 123% of its people's hours. Creative sits near 65%, even with its share of the new work.
Two creatives have already given notice. The plan was to replace them and hire nobody in paid media, which is backwards. Freelancers cover the media overflow at about $125 an hour against about $53 for the agency's own people. Two paid media hires add about $140K of EBITDA next year. Letting the creative roles go adds about the same. That's moving headcount, not adding it.
Reported EBITDA is $1.8M. Add back the founder's pay above a market salary, personal costs run through the business and two one-off costs, and a buyer sees about $2.2M. At an illustrative multiple that's roughly $9M to $14M, with a big share held back in an earn-out.
Three things move the price. Vessimer under 15% of AGI. A client lead who owns the three accounts the founder runs today, which costs about $165K a year and raises the value more than five times that. And books a buyer doesn't have to rebuild: when Teamwork hours and QuickBooks tie out by client and month, diligence is shorter and less of the price waits in an earn-out.
A 5% rise on retainers at January renewals is the single biggest move, about $380K of EBITDA.
SPRCHRGR has run on Teamwork since 2023, and we have a full API connection to Teamwork Projects and Teamwork Desk, alongside QuickBooks, Gusto and HubSpot. On a real engagement this page reads your own Teamwork site. Your timelogs post labor cost to QuickBooks by client and project, your Desk tickets show service load by client, and media and vendor bills sit against the client payments that fund them. Comments land back on the right Teamwork task. Your team keeps working where it works now.
That's CFOptimize for Agencies, and it starts with a free agency valuation check on your own numbers. Book your free agency valuation check.
Mark
Tansley Reed is a made-up company, and every client, prospect, vendor, task, ticket, comment, person and number in the dashboard and this post is invented. QuickBooks, Teamwork, Gusto, HubSpot, Google Ads and Meta are real products, named as the tools an agency like this runs on; none of them is connected to the sample. Benchmarks, multiples and the earn-out rule are illustrative rules of thumb, not a valuation.