1. Fees
If you run a marketing agency and put client ad spend on your card, keep it separate from your agency fee.
When $40k of Meta spend and your $6k retainer both land in one income account, your revenue looks great and your margin looks terrible. Neither number tells you anything.
Set up a separate income account for reimbursed ad spend and a matching expense account for what you actually paid the platforms. Your fee revenue stands on its own, and you can finally see what the agency earns.
2. Focus
Most owners track billable time and nothing else. That leaves the biggest chunk of the week invisible.
Track all of it — client work, bookkeeping, sales calls, posting, the rebuild of your website. You do not need fancy software, just an honest log.
Once you know that you spent 14 hours on marketing last month and it produced two leads, you can put a real number on it. You cannot calculate ROI on time you never measured.
3. Friction
Count the steps between someone saying “I want this” and someone paying you.
If the answer is a discovery call, a second call, a proposal you send three days later, and an invoice they have to mail a check for, you are losing people who already decided to buy.
Send the proposal the same day. Use e-signature. Include a payment link. Make it easy to say yes twice.
Until next week
