If the last year felt like a rollercoaster for your agency, you aren’t the only one holding on tight. In a recent survey, 36% of agency employees identified client churn or unstable revenue as the issue with the most significant impact on profitability over the last 12 months.
That instability creates a stressful cycle of feast or famine. When revenue fluctuates wildly, it becomes nearly impossible to plan for hiring, resource allocation, or long-term growth. As we move into the new year, the goal isn’t just to survive—it’s to build a sustainable, predictable pipeline that smooths out those peaks and valleys.
Stabilizing your agency’s revenue requires more than hope; it demands intentional action. Here are five practical strategies to help you find new business and secure your agency’s financial health in the year ahead.
1. Carve Out Non-Negotiable “Deep Work” Time
One of the biggest hurdles agency leaders face is the “cobbler’s children” syndrome. You spend so much time putting out fires for your clients that you neglect your own business development. If you don’t prioritize your agency’s growth, no one else will.
To fix this, you must treat your own business development with the same rigor you apply to client deadlines. Start by blocking out specific time on your calendar every week dedicated solely to deep work and new business activities. This isn’t time for checking emails or answering Slack messages; it is protected time for strategic growth.
Drew McLellan of the Agency Management Institute recommends spending at least two hours a week focused exclusively on new business. This could involve:
- Building a prospect list using modern data tools.
- Sending warm outreach emails to your network.
- Writing thought leadership content that positions you as an expert.
- Reconnecting with former clients to see where they are now.
When you make yourself unavailable for daily operations during these blocks, you force the deep work to happen. This consistency is what builds a pipeline over time, rather than the frantic, reactive scrambling that happens when a large client suddenly leaves.
2. Mine Your Existing Client Base for Organic Growth
The path of least resistance to new revenue often lies with the people who already pay you. Your current clients already trust you, know your work, and have a billing relationship with you. Yet, many agencies fail to systematically tap into this resource for growth.
Focusing on your current customers can yield returns in two distinct ways: upselling and referrals.
Upselling and Cross-selling
Audit your current client roster. Are there commonalities in the services they buy? More importantly, are there gaps? If you built a website for a client last year, they might now need ongoing SEO support or content marketing. By proactively identifying these needs and presenting solutions, you can increase the lifetime value of that client without the high cost of acquiring a new one.
Building a Referral Engine
Word of mouth remains one of the most powerful marketing tools available. However, waiting for referrals to happen by accident is not a strategy. Make it a habit to check in with happy clients—perhaps over coffee or a quick call—not just to discuss project status, but to gauge their satisfaction and ask if they know others who face similar challenges. When you deliver exceptional results, your clients become your best sales team.
3. Sharpen Your Niche and Positioning
In a crowded marketplace, being a “full-service agency for everyone” is often a recipe for invisibility. When you try to speak to everyone, you end up speaking to no one. To attract high-quality leads, you need to be a lead magnet for a specific type of problem or industry.
Building a niche doesn’t mean you have to turn away work that falls outside of it, especially in the early stages. But your outbound marketing and positioning should be laser-focused. Whether it’s “digital marketing for healthcare startups” or “branding for sustainable CPG companies,” a clear niche allows you to demonstrate deep expertise.
When a prospect lands on your site, they should immediately feel that you understand their specific industry headaches. This expertise builds trust faster than a generic portfolio ever could, shortening the sales cycle and increasing your win rate.
4. Diversify Your Client Portfolio
While niching down in your marketing is smart, relying too heavily on a single client or a single industry for your revenue is dangerous. If 2025 taught us anything, it’s that economic winds can shift quickly, affecting specific sectors disproportionately.
Review your revenue concentration. If one client makes up 50% of your income, losing them is a catastrophic event. If all your clients are in the tech sector and that sector faces a downturn, your agency faces a downturn.
Look for adjacent industries where your skills transfer easily. If you are experts in B2B tech, could you apply those same methodologies to B2B manufacturing or professional services? Diversifying your client base acts as an insurance policy, ensuring that a slowdown in one area doesn’t derail your entire year.
5. Embrace AI to Accelerate Your Sales Process
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a futuristic concept; it is a current necessity. Agencies that fail to adopt AI tools risk falling behind competitors who can move faster and more efficiently.
In the context of new business, AI can be a massive leverage point. Tools exist today that can help you:
- Analyze vast amounts of data to identify high-fit prospects.
- Personalize outreach emails at scale, moving beyond the generic “spray and pray” approach.
- Automate the tedious parts of follow-up and scheduling.
By integrating AI into your sales process, you can free up your human talent to focus on what they do best: building relationships and closing deals. It allows a smaller team to punch above its weight class, handling a volume of leads that would previously have required a much larger staff.
Optimize Your Operations for Growth
Finding new business is only half the battle; managing it efficiently is the other. As your pipeline grows, relying on spreadsheets and disparate tools creates operational bottlenecks. You need a centralized system that gives you visibility into your pipeline, resource capacity, and project profitability in real time.
This is where a robust agency management system like Deltek WorkBook becomes essential. It consolidates your tech stack, offering end-to-end visibility from the first sales contact to the final invoice.
PCI is a Deltek Premier Partner, specializing in helping agencies implement and optimize these systems. Whether you need assistance with software implementation, ongoing support, or strategies to improve your overall operational efficiency, PCI can help you build the infrastructure you need to handle new business without the chaos.
