In this episode of the 7 Figure Agency Podcast, host Joshua Nelson explains that scaling a digital marketing agency starts with crystal‑clear revenue goals and a concrete tracking system. He argues that without defined targets, agencies get lost in “commentary” – busy work that doesn’t move the business forward. Nelson cites Brian Tracy’s goal‑setting principles and a 1979 Harvard graduate study showing that written goals and plans dramatically increase earnings, especially for the 3% who both write goals and a plan. He illustrates the concept with a decade‑long case study of agency owner Brian K., whose business jumped from $60K MRR to a $5M‑plus annual revenue after implementing a “sales and retention tracking sheet.” The sheet breaks down annual revenue targets into quarterly, monthly, and client‑level metrics, accounting for new client acquisition and churn (typically 5‑10%). By logging wins and losses each month, agencies can stay on track, make better decisions, and involve their teams in the growth process. Nelson offers the tracking sheet for free at go.7figureagency.com/tracking and urges listeners to download it, apply the step‑by‑step process, and share feedback in the comments, emphasizing that “what you measure gets done.”
Chapters
This is the 7 Figure Agency Podcast. Discover the strategies and techniques to grow a highly successful and profitable digital marketing agency with your host, Joshua Nelson. How do you track the growth in your digital marketing agency? That's what I'm going to unpack for today's video. So when it comes to growing and scaling your digital marketing agency, the first thing you need, the first thing you have to put in place is massive clarity about what you're looking to accomplish. Whether you are a 7-figure agency looking to go to multiple 7 figures, or you're just getting started and you've got a goal to get to $50,000 or $60,000 in monthly recurring revenue, there's lots of shiny objects from your prospecting to your delivery to building your team that can take you off track. But if you're not super clear, here's what I want to go, and then you don't have a mechanism to track. Well, if that's the goal, how does that break down by quarter? How does that break down by month? If you don't have that and you don't track that, you'll never get there, right? You'll be busy in commentary. There's a great book by Brian Tracy, it's called The Ultimate Goal Setting Program, and one of the things that really stood out to me in that training is this concept that success is goals, all else is commentary. In the absence of having a goal that's front and center that you're actively striving towards, that your team is involved in, you're gonna get busy, but you're gonna get busy in commentary with things that aren't necessarily going to move you forward, going to move you in the direction that you're after. I really believe that having clear goals, having a clear target, and then more importantly, having a tracking mechanism that you can track against to hold yourself accountable is almost like creating the wind, creating the momentum within your sale. Anytime I talk to an agency that's stagnated, maybe they got to $20,000 a month recurring, or they got to $80,000 a month recurring, and, and now they're stagnated, I usually ask, okay, so like, what's the goal and how are you tracking against that goal right now? And I say, you know what, I stopped setting future goals. Like, at some point in our business, we got to a certain plateau and we stopped looking forward. We stopped like really striving to get to whatever the next level was. And as simple as that is, it's absolutely true. You know, a great example of this is Brian Kaskavalshian. It's one of the agencies I've worked with almost a decade now. But Brian and I were in a mastermind together, and he had grown his agency to $60,000 in monthly recurring revenue, and he was just kind of there, right? It was a good life, it was a good income, but the business wasn't growing. At the beginning of one year, we decided we'd get together and we would map out new goals and targets. And I shared with him what I call our sales and retention tracking sheet, which I'm gonna be sharing with you in just a minute. And we took the time to plot out his goals. How many clients would they sell? How many clients would they churn? Where does that put them by the end of the month, by the end of the quarter, by the end of the year? And having that tracking mechanism and getting his team on board with that tracking mechanism triggered something in his business. And from that year forward, he was in a consistent growth and momentum, grew the business to over $5 million per year, recently sold it, and, and had a multiple 7-figure exit. And he'll tell you that one of the game change moves was just getting really clear on how he was tracking the growth and how he was getting his team involved in that progress of moving the business forward. To kind of further this concept, there was a study done by Harvard back in the 19— 80s, 1979. And what they did was they, they got with the graduates back in that year and they asked them, do you have goals and a written plan in place? And what they found was 84% of the graduates had no goals, right? They, they just like, hey, I'm graduating, I'm going to probably get a job somewhere, I'm going to make some money. 13% had goals, but there wasn't a written plan. So I was like, yeah, I know this is where I'm going to accomplish they just hadn't written a plan for it. And then 3% had a clear goal and a plan on how they were going to accomplish it, clear goal that was written out. And the reason I'm sharing this story is because they circled back a decade later, and what they found was the 13% of the class that had the goals written down were on average earning 84% as much as the ones that had no goals. So just because they had goals and they written them down they were 84% above the rest of the class. But what's even more pressing is the 3% that had written goals and a plan— whether it was the right plan or not, they had a plan that they were executing against— were earning 10 times as much as the other 97%. And so if you're serious about growing your digital marketing agency, you're serious about taking things to the next level, you want to have a goal, have a tracking mechanism, and build a plan that's gonna move you towards the accomplishment of that goal, whether that's the perfect plan or not, right? I really believe that if we fail to plan, then we're planning to fail. And so I've got a simple tracking mechanism I wanna share with you because it's been such a game changer for myself and my agency that grew to $5 million and is continuing to grow, as well as hundreds of agencies that have come through the 7 Figure Agency Program. And that's what I call our sales and retention tracking sheet. And you can access it by going to go.7figureagency.com/tracking. It will get you access to a multiple tab sheet. But really what this does is it helps you get clear where you're at right now, what the goal is, and it's all focused around monthly recurring revenue. From there, it helps you plot out your goal based on where you are right now and where you want to get over the next year, over the next couple of years, and then chunks it down by month, by quarter, and ultimately by year. And when you think about your agency growth, the key things you want to be focused on are: how many clients do we expect to land? How much are those clients going to be worth on a monthly retainer? So we're going to land 5 clients, they're going to pay us $2,000 a month on average, so we want to sell $10,000 in new monthly recurring revenue. Let's just say that's the goal. Now, if you're at any level of scale, You can't just think about new client growth because there's always a churn component in your agency, right? Regardless of how good you are, there's going to be some amount of clients that cancel each month, and it's usually somewhere between 5 to 10%. And if you've got your retention dialed in, you can get it down to like 2 or 3% if you're really, really good on that front. So it's important that as you set your growth target, you've also tracked How many clients do we expect to churn? And if you have no idea what that churn might be, I would just arbitrarily set it at 5%. So if you've got 10 clients, 5%, you'll probably lose like 1 or 2 clients per quarter. What this sheet will do is it will help you see this is the goal for the month, 5 clients won, 2 clients lost, let's just say. And then it will help you track on a month-over-month basis Are you on track for that, or are you off track for that? And I, I promise you, if you take 15 minutes, the step-by-step process will walk you through how to set this up, and then you'll commit to log your new clients as you get them, log your clients as you lose them. You will absolutely be making better decisions. You'll be executing your plan at a higher level. You'll be more likely to hit the growth targets that you've set, and then bring your team into that process with you. And so this is my free gift to you. You grab it now by going to go.7figureagency.com/tracking. Let me know what you think about this. Let me know in the comments. I just want to leave you with this today: if you're not tracking the goals that you have for yourself, then you're really not going to get the outcomes that you're after, right? Because what you measure gets done. What you track always improves. So let's make sure we've got a great plan and we've got a tracking mechanism to, to really track the growth of our digital marketing agencies. If you have any questions about this, let me know in the comments. And again, you can grab that by going to go.7figureagency.com/tracking. Go grow your agency. I look forward to talking with you soon.
