Marketing agency growth calculator
More clients, higher prices, or both?
Your numbers
Research, writing, design and video drafted for review instead of made from scratch. Reviewing and approving stays with you — set this to whatever you believe.
Gap to your target
$10,000
a month. $20,000 today from 10 clients at $2,000.
- Win new clients
- +5 clients
- Or raise the retainer
- $3,000 · +50%
- Or half of each
- 12 × $2,500
- Delivery cost
- What you keep
Scout7 is what moves the delivery segment — it drafts the work for each client, you approve it.
Winning 5 clients means 5 more sales cycles and about $1,100 a month in sales overhead; raising the retainer +50% means 10 conversations. At the target, the dial is worth $6,000 a month.
Benchmarks used
- 5–25×How much more it costs to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing oneHarvard Business Review, 2014
- 8–14%Sales and marketing overhead as a share of agency gross income — what growth by acquisition costs before any workParakeeto, 2025
- $3,209Average monthly SEO retainer charged by agencies, from a survey of 439 providersAhrefs, 2024
- 40–50%Production’s share of a delivery week once hours are counted; AI in the production step recovers 15–30% of production hours onlyScout7 Academy: Run a marketing agency
What this works out
- How many new clients you need at today’s retainer
- What the average retainer must become at today’s client count
- A blended route that does half of each
- A price-rise table showing revenue and profit after clients leave, and the break-even number of departures
How it’s calculated
Every figure above comes from these steps, so you can check the working or run it by hand.
- 1
Route one: divide the target by today’s average retainer to get the clients you need, and count the sales and marketing overhead that acquisition adds.
- 2
Route two: divide the target by today’s client count to get the retainer you need, and the uplift that implies.
- 3
Route three: raise prices by a percentage and assume some clients leave. Revenue after departures is the remaining clients times the new retainer.
- 4
Break-even departures is the number of clients you can lose at a given rise and still make today’s revenue: clients times rise divided by one plus the rise, rounded down.
- 5
Profit after a rise is usually better than revenue suggests, because the leaver takes their delivery cost with them.
Questions
Why is expanding existing clients cheaper than winning new ones?
Harvard Business Review cites the standard estimate that acquiring a customer costs five to twenty-five times more than keeping one, and agency benchmarks put sales and marketing overhead at 8 to 14 percent of gross income. An expansion is one conversation.
How big should a price rise be?
Small rises are the expensive mistake: a 5 percent increase cannot survive a single departure. A 20 percent rise across ten clients loses one and still leaves you ahead with less work to do.
What if one client is most of my revenue?
Then the table does not apply to them. A client above about a quarter of revenue gets their own conversation, timing and probably a smaller number.
Learn the arithmetic
The Academy guides behind this calculator. Free, no signup.
Sell more per client without adding hours.
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