Christian Beatty
A buyer asks for your last 12 months of KPIs, margins, and processes. Most agency owners do not have one place to look. The revenue is in the payment tool. The cancellations are in the memory of the owner. The processes are in the heads of three people.
One owner told me: "A buyer would wait a month, and some of my numbers would be guesses." That is a problem for a sale. It is also a problem if you do not plan to sell. If you cannot see the numbers, you cannot step away for two weeks.
This post shows what buyers of agencies usually ask for. It shows the owner dashboard that I built for a local SEO agency with approximately 85 clients, and what a buyer can see in it. It also shows the steps to make a simple data room this week.
What a buyer of an agency asks for
Most buyer questions are on these topics:
Retainer revenue: how much revenue repeats each month, and how much comes from one-time projects.
Churn: how many clients leave each month, and why.
Client concentration: how much revenue comes from the largest clients.
Margins: the profit after the cost of the people who do the work.
Owner dependence: what stops when the owner is not there.
Documented processes: if a new person can do the work from written steps.
A buyer pays for revenue that continues after the sale. Each question above tests that. If an answer comes slowly, or starts with "I think", the buyer sees more risk. I do not give valuation multiples here, because they change with the market and the buyer.
Why the answers take a month
The owner is not careless. The data is in five tools, and no tool connects them.
The payment tool does not know why a client left.
The client list is in the CRM or a project board, and the start and end dates are often empty.
The cancel reasons are in emails or in the memory of the owner.
Nobody records if the work was late.
The processes are in videos, chat threads, and the heads of the team.
To answer a buyer, the owner must export each tool, match the client names by hand, and fill the gaps from memory. This is a system problem. The data exists, but it is not in one record.
One system with the numbers that a buyer asks for
At the agency, the platform keeps the clients, services, tasks, payments, and calls in one database. The owner dashboard reads from this database. Only owners can open it.
The dashboard has six tabs: Clients, Payments to chase, Calls, Churn, Industries, and Team workload. The Churn, Calls, and Team workload tabs have a time period filter. The periods are this month, last month, the last 90 days, the last 12 months, and all time. Each period, except all time, shows a comparison with the period before it.
Revenue and clients
The Clients tab shows the number of active clients and the active monthly revenue (MRR). The monthly fee comes from the client record. When the fee is $0, the daily Square sync fills it from the amount that Square bills.
The tab also shows how many clients pay through Square on a repeat schedule. If that number is smaller than the number of active clients, the tab shows the difference. A buyer will ask: "Do all of the active clients actually pay?" The dashboard shows the answer on the first screen.
Churn from billing, not from memory
The Churn tab does not use the status that a person sets. It calculates churn from the Square billing history, with these rules:
Only customers with two or more payments count.
The usual billing cycle of a customer is the median time between their payments.
A customer has left when no invoice is scheduled and the last payment is older than 1.5 cycles.
The minimum time for this rule is 45 days.
One-time website projects do not count as lost clients.
Because of the 45-day minimum, the newest month is complete only after approximately six weeks.
For the selected period, the tab shows the churn rate, the clients lost, the monthly revenue lost, the new clients, and the net change. A bar chart shows the monthly churn rate for the last 12 months. Below the chart, a table lists each lost client with the start date, the last payment, the monthly fee, and the cancel reason. An owner cannot mark a client as past without a reason.
This data also shows when clients leave. At this agency, clients in month 2 or 3 cancelled at 9 to 12 percent a month. After month 3, this decreased to approximately 6 percent, and after one year to less than 5 percent. For a buyer, this shows that the older clients are stable.
Which industries stay and pay
The Industries tab puts each client niche into a broader industry, for example HVAC, electrical, or pest control. For each industry, it shows:
The number of clients, and the percentage that are still clients
The average number of months that a client paid
The average total that a client paid, and the average payment for each month
The current MRR
Clients won minus clients lost in the last 12 months
This tab shows concentration by industry. A separate concentration view shows the share of revenue from the largest clients.
Money that is late
The Payments to chase tab lists the Square invoices that are past the due date and not paid, or that failed. It shows the total owed. Invoices more than 100 days late from past clients are not in the total, but a note lists them.
Delivery and the team
The Team workload tab counts tasks for each person, or for all people, in the selected period:
Approved: tasks approved, with the change from the previous period
On time: the percentage approved by the due date
Days to approve: the average time from created to approved
Sent back: the percentage of reviewed work that the reviewer returned
Overdue now: overdue tasks, out of all open tasks
The tab says that it counts tasks, not effort. It shows if delivery is under control. It does not show how hard each person works. The work queue post shows how each task receives one person, one due date, and one proof.
These numbers come from a log. Each time a task changes status, the database records the old status, the new status, the person, and the time. The client status log does the same for each change to current, paused, or past, with the reason.
Processes that a new person can use
Numbers show what happened. A buyer also asks how the work is done, and if it continues without the owner. The platform keeps the SOPs in 14 sections, from intake and onboarding to the save flow for a client at risk.
Each SOP step has a number and two tags: how the step is done today, and the target. The tags are Manual, Automated, AI-enabled, and AI-automated. Some steps run with AI. A person reviews the AI output before it goes to a client. A step that nobody confirmed yet has the mark "guess". A buyer can see which steps are confirmed and which steps are a draft.
The people assigned to a service can edit its SOP in the app. Each section shows who edited it last, and when. The steps on each task come from the SOP for its service. Because of this, the SOP is the instruction on the task, not a document that nobody opens.
A separate team guide, in Simplified Technical English, is for new team members. It tells a person how to sign in, use the work queue, do a task, and review a task.
Profit, concentration, and the 12-month report
A buyer will also ask these questions. The table shows how the platform answers each one.
Buyer question | In the system |
|---|---|
Profit for each client | The platform shows the profit for each client, with the labor cost. |
Labor cost and margins | The platform shows the cost of each deliverable. Payroll and expenses are in the books of the agency. |
Client concentration | A concentration view shows the share of revenue from the largest clients. |
A 12-month report in one click | A period filter covers the last 12 months. An export button downloads the numbers. |
Clients who paid only once | Not in the Churn tab, because of the two-payment rule. In 2026, 12 of 58 new clients paid only once. |
Monthly tasks | The monthly job creates the monthly tasks on the 1st of each month. |
The margin view is the most important. A buyer usually values profit, not only revenue. Because labor cost is in the system, the owner can show the margin for each client.
The two-week test
The quiz asks a second question: what happens if you step away for two weeks? A buyer asks the same question in a different form. If the business stops without the owner, the buyer buys a job, not a company.
The platform makes the work less dependent on the owner. The work queue shows each task, the person, the reviewer, and the due date. A reviewer approves the major tasks. Each day, the risk score marks the clients who possibly will cancel.
Some actions are still for owners only: client data, billing, and status changes. Because of this, a second person must have the owner role before the owner steps away.
Start this week: a simple data room
Use a spreadsheet. Use your payment tool as the source, not your memory.
Make one row for each client, current and past.
Add these columns: start date, end date, monthly fee, industry, and cancel reason.
Fill the start and end dates from your payment tool.
Mark each client who paid only once. Keep these clients out of the churn count.
For each of the last 12 months, count the clients at the start of the month.
For each month, count the clients lost.
Divide the clients lost by the clients at the start. This is the monthly churn rate.
Sort the clients by monthly fee. Calculate the share of revenue from the five largest clients.
Ask your accountant for the labor cost of each month. Put it next to the revenue for that month.
Write the steps for your most frequent service in a shared document.
Mark each step that nobody confirmed.
On the first day of each month, do steps 3 to 9 again.
The first time takes one or two days. After that, it takes less than one hour each month. When a buyer asks, you send the spreadsheet on the same day.
How does your agency score?
Operability and saleability is one of eight areas in the free agency systems quiz. The quiz has 14 questions and takes 5 minutes. You receive a score out of 100 and your three largest gaps.
Take the 5 minute quiz. Or book a call, and I will show you how a system like this can work in your agency.