Built for Agency Founders

The CRM for agency founders still running sales, delivery, and hiring at the same time.

Founders of 10-to-50-person marketing, creative, and digital agencies carry pipeline, delivery, cash flow, and hiring in one body. Strkr ships native Products for retainer and project line items, Projects for delivery, Marketing for thought leadership, and Strkr AI for proposal drafting on one workspace.

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Why buyers are here

Agencies Founders: the daily pains.

Agency founders at the 10-to-50-person stage occupy a specific shape of pain that neither a project tool nor a lightweight CRM was designed around. The pipeline lives in a HoneyBook or Dubsado proposal queue, the delivery board lives in Notion, the cash flow forecast lives in a Google Sheet rebuilt on Sunday night, the retainer book lives in a QuickBooks export plus founder memory, and the referral motion lives in Slack DMs. The pains below are the ones that show up on every agency founder onboarding call we take, and they are the reason the CRM for a 10-to-50-person owner has to look different from the CRM for either a solo freelancer or a 400-rep sales floor.

Three hats, one calendar

Head of sales, head of delivery, head of hiring, all this week.

Agency founders at 10 to 50 people run sales calls Monday, review three project burndowns Tuesday, interview an AM candidate Wednesday, write a SOW Thursday, and chase an overdue invoice Friday. The context switch tax is brutal, and the system is a stack of tabs. Strkr puts the pipeline, the project boards, the SOW drafts, and the people record on one workspace, so the context switch is a tab change, not a tool change, and the founder gets Friday afternoon back.

Retainer plus project blend

HoneyBook sees proposals, nothing sees the retainer book.

HoneyBook and Dubsado are built for the one-off project proposal shape. They do not model a monthly retainer with a scope ladder, a renewal date, and a utilization burn against hours banked. Strkr native Products supports retainer line items, project line items, usage-based add-ons, and renewal dates on the same quote, so the quote the founder sends matches the invoice the client receives and the forecast picks up both revenue shapes without a spreadsheet layer.

Cash-flow visibility

The forecast lives in a Sunday-night spreadsheet rebuild.

Agency cash flow depends on recurring retainer revenue plus a lumpy project pipeline plus the receivables aging. Most founders rebuild the view in a Sheet every Sunday from a QuickBooks export, a HoneyBook pipeline export, and memory. Strkr runs weighted forecast on the pipeline, retainer MRR on the Products book, and receivable health on the same workspace, so the Monday cash call is a live view, not a Sunday rebuild, and the growth decision happens on evidence.

First revenue hire

No way to hand off a HoneyBook pipeline to an AE or AM.

The first AE or AM candidate joins and the founder discovers nothing is written down in a way a human can inherit. Who talked to whom, what was promised, which objection stalled the deal, which client is the renewal risk this quarter. Strkr makes the handoff a record transfer, not a two-week knowledge dump. The new hire opens an account record and sees every conversation, every stage change, every SOW, and the Strkr AI summary of where the relationship is and why.

Utilization vs growth

The delivery team is at 95 percent, and sales just closed another one.

Agency owners live on a utilization-versus-growth tension. Sell too much and delivery slips, which costs the next renewal. Sell too little and the bench costs eat the margin. Strkr Projects shows live capacity across the delivery team on the same workspace that holds the pipeline, so the founder sees the capacity cliff before the closed-won email, and the growth plan gets grounded in real hours, not a hopeful spreadsheet.

Referral motion

Half the pipeline comes from existing clients, and nothing tracks it.

Mature agencies get 40 to 60 percent of new logo revenue from referrals, and most founders track the referral motion in Slack DMs and memory. Strkr runs referral tracking as a native relationship on the account record, with the referrer, the referred account, the source conversation, and the resulting deal, so the thank-you note goes out on time, the top referrers get surfaced in the quarterly client review, and the referral motion becomes a system instead of a hope.

How Strkr fits an agency founder week

Sales, delivery, and renewals on one workspace.

The agency founder motion has a specific shape: a retainer book that is 60 to 70 percent of revenue, a lumpy project pipeline, a delivery team in a project tool, a referral motion that drives half the new logos, and a founder who is still the senior seller and the senior reviewer at once. The cards below are the surfaces an agency founder lives in across a normal week, and the ones that stay unchanged when the first AE or AM joins. Every surface ships on every paid seat with no premium module gate and no proposal-count wall.

Pipeline for agencies

Discovery, SOW, pilot, retainer, expansion.

An agency-shaped pipeline with stages that match how a 10-to-50-person shop actually sells: Discovery call, Scoping, SOW drafted, SOW signed, Pilot engagement, Retainer live, Expansion. Every email, every call, every SOW version lands on the account record automatically. The founder stops living in a HoneyBook inbox and starts living in a pipeline view that matches the real motion.

Products for retainers

Retainer line items, scope ladders, renewal dates.

Native Products supports monthly retainer line items with a scope ladder, project line items with a fixed fee or a time-and-materials shape, usage-based add-ons for over-scope hours, and a renewal date on every retainer. The quote the founder sends matches the invoice the client receives, and the forecast picks up both revenue shapes without a reconciliation spreadsheet.

Projects for delivery

The delivery board lives on the same record as the deal.

Strkr Projects runs the delivery board for every signed engagement on the same workspace. Issues, sprints, assignees, and burndown live on the project record. The founder opens the account and sees the pipeline, the signed SOW, the Products line items, and the live project burndown, without a tab switch, so the Friday delivery review happens on one surface.

Strkr AI proposals

A SOW draft in two minutes, not two hours.

Strkr AI drafts proposals from the discovery notes, the quoted retainer tier, and the previous SOWs on the account. The founder reviews, edits, and sends. The two-hour Sunday proposal ritual shrinks to a twenty-minute Friday review, and the founder gets the weekend back without pushing the proposal to Monday and watching the deal cool.

Fast capture

Log a discovery call before the next Slack ping lands.

A single-screen capture modal: who the person was, what the meeting was, what to do next, which retainer tier they fit. The founder leaves a discovery Zoom, logs the call in thirty seconds, and the deal moves to Scoping automatically. The data quality holds because the capture happens while the context is fresh, not on Sunday night from a calendar scrape.

Mobile first

The conference and client-dinner week still gets logged.

Agency founder calendars include industry conferences, client dinners, pitch travel, and a lot of airport time. Strkr mobile is a first-class surface with offline queue, voice-note capture, dialer, and SMS. The parking-lot moment becomes a logged activity instead of a mental note that evaporates on the flight home.

Retainer book, forecast, and cash flow

Run the business the way an agency owner needs to see it.

An agency owner reads the business on retainer MRR plus project backlog plus receivable health plus delivery utilization. Most 10-to-50-person owners rebuild all of this in a Google Sheet on Sunday night from a QuickBooks export, a HoneyBook pipeline export, and delivery lead memory. The rebuild gets fragile as the retainer book passes 20 accounts and the pipeline passes 15 open opportunities. Strkr runs all of it as live views on the same record system, so the Monday cash call pulls from one source.

Retainer MRR

The recurring revenue line, live, by account.

Every signed retainer rolls to an MRR line on the Products book, with the renewal date, the scope tier, and the primary contact. The founder sees the retainer book total, the renewal cliff for the next quarter, and the churned retainers for the last twelve months on one view. The MRR number stops being a QuickBooks reconciliation and starts being a live operating metric.

Weighted pipeline

The project revenue, probability-weighted against the quarter.

Every open opportunity carries a stage probability. The weighted forecast rolls to a dollar amount against the quarter target. The founder sees the coverage ratio before it is a crisis and dials up outbound or referral work on week two of the quarter, not week ten. The pipeline view is the same object as the forecast, so the number cannot drift from reality.

Receivable health

Which invoices are aging, which clients are drifting.

Strkr pulls invoice aging onto the account record, so the founder sees the ninety-day receivable on the same screen as the pipeline and the project burndown. The gentle collection reminder goes out on a Flow before the aging turns into a hard conversation, and the forecast gets a confidence adjustment for the clients drifting on payments.

Utilization

Live capacity across the delivery team.

Projects reports capacity on the delivery team by role, with assigned hours against available hours. The founder sees the capacity cliff before the closed-won email, so the growth plan gets grounded in real hours. The hiring timeline becomes a plan with a trigger date instead of a reaction to a late project.

Renewal risk

Strkr AI reads the signal on which retainer is wobbling.

Strkr AI reads the activity on every retainer: the project burndown, the sentiment of the last client reply, the gap-to-next check-in, the overage history. Retainers that look at risk surface on the Friday review, so the save conversation happens on week eight of the quarter, not week eleven when the churn notice arrives.

Top-5 accounts

The accounts that will make the quarter, on one card.

A saved view of the top five accounts by weighted dollar amount for the quarter, with the retainer status, the open expansion, the next check-in, the Strkr AI risk flag, and the last activity date. The founder shares it with the leadership team and everyone works from the same five accounts in the same shape.

Referrals, thought leadership, and the first revenue hire

Build a growth engine that outlives the founder calendar.

Mature agencies get 40 to 60 percent of new logo revenue from referrals and inbound thought leadership. Most 10-to-50-person founders run both motions on vibes. Strkr runs both as system motions on the same workspace. Marketing ships included on every paid seat, so the agency can run its own list, nurture, and content calendar without a separate SaaS stack. The referral motion sits on the account record with a tracked relationship, so top referrers surface in the quarterly client review.

Referral tracking

Who sent you this deal, and the last three they sent.

Native referral relationship on the account record: the referrer, the referred account, the source conversation, the resulting deal size, the thank-you status. The founder opens a referrer card and sees the last three deals they sent, so the thank-you note and the quarterly check-in happen on a cadence, not on memory.

Marketing included

Broadcast, nurture, forms, and sequences on every seat.

The Marketing module ships on every paid seat with email broadcast for the agency newsletter, nurture flows for the inbound lead that is not ready yet, landing pages for the new service offering, forms for the gated case study, and cold-outbound sequences for the targeted account list. The thought leadership motion stops being a separate SaaS and starts being a surface the founder already lives in.

Case studies

The won work turned into pitch material.

Every signed engagement has a project record. When the engagement delivers results, Strkr AI drafts a case study from the project notes, the before-and-after metrics, and the client quotes captured on the account. The founder reviews, edits, and publishes. The case-study backlog that normally takes a quarter to catch up ships in a week.

First AE or AM

Reassign an account in one click, keep the context.

When the first AE or AM joins, the founder reassigns accounts and the full history travels: every email, every call, every SOW, every project note, every Strkr AI summary of where the relationship is and why. The two-week handoff shrinks to a one-day onboarding review, and the quiet signals that normally get lost in a tool migration stay with the account.

No proposal-count wall

Pricing that does not punish growth in sent SOWs.

HoneyBook and Dubsado plans gate on proposal counts and project volumes. Strkr runs on per-seat pricing. The agency sending ten proposals a month and the agency sending a hundred pay on the same shape, and the growth hire ramps up outbound without triggering a plan renegotiation on the SaaS bill.

Flows

The automations the founder keeps meaning to build.

New lead gets a routing to the discovery queue. SOW sent for forty-eight hours gets a nudge on the founder queue. Retainer renewal date minus sixty gets a check-in task. Case study published gets a push to the client newsletter and the LinkedIn draft queue. The visual Flows builder means the founder ships the automation in an afternoon, not a quarter.

Head-to-head

Strkr for agency founders vs HoneyBook plus Notion plus spreadsheets.

The default stack for a 10-to-50-person agency owner is HoneyBook or Dubsado for proposals, Notion for the delivery board, and a handful of Google Sheets for the retainer book, the forecast, and the utilization math. It works for a quarter or two, then four cracks appear: HoneyBook does not model a retainer with a scope ladder, Notion does not report on utilization or burndown, the sheets go stale the moment a second person updates them, and nothing lets the founder reassign an account to a first AE or AM without a two-week handoff. Strkr replaces all four with one workspace.

What matters Strkr HoneyBook + Notion + spreadsheets
Pricing model Per-seat only, no proposal-count wall HoneyBook gates by proposal volume and plan tier
Retainer line items Native Products with scope ladder, renewal date, usage add-ons HoneyBook models one-off projects, retainer is a workaround
Delivery board Native Projects on the same record as the deal Notion board, no link to the account or the forecast
Utilization reporting Live capacity across delivery team by role Spreadsheet rebuilt on Sunday night
Weighted forecast Pipeline + retainer MRR + receivable health on one view Three separate Sheets reconciled from exports
Proposal drafting Strkr AI drafts from discovery notes and prior SOWs Manual SOW build or static template library
Referral tracking Native relationship on account record, top-referrer view Slack DMs and founder memory
Email marketing Included on every seat, no contact cap Separate Mailchimp or ConvertKit SKU on top
First revenue hire handoff Reassign account, full history and summary travel with it Two-week knowledge dump from Slack DMs
Tools open on a given day 1 (Strkr) 4 to 6 (proposals + Notion + sheets + email + accounting)

See the CRM for agency founders running sales, delivery, and hiring at once.

Start a 14-day trial with the full workspace enabled: CRM, native Products for retainers and projects, Projects for delivery, Marketing included on every seat, Strkr AI for proposal drafting and renewal risk, Flows, SMS, mobile. Per-seat pricing that does not scale with proposal volume. Build a pipeline, a retainer book, and a delivery board on one workspace in an afternoon.

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Common questions

Agencies Founders buyer FAQ.

Why Strkr for a 10-to-50-person agency founder specifically, instead of HoneyBook or Dubsado?

HoneyBook and Dubsado are built for the one-off project proposal shape and the solo-to-small-team service business. They work until two things are true at once: the retainer book becomes more than 50 percent of revenue, and the founder needs to see pipeline plus delivery plus utilization plus cash flow on one surface. HoneyBook does not model a retainer with a scope ladder and a renewal date, Notion does not report on utilization or burndown, and the Sheets stack goes stale the moment a second person updates it. Strkr runs all four on one workspace, with native Products for the retainer-plus-project blend, Projects for the delivery board, and Marketing included for the thought leadership motion. The per-seat price does not scale with proposal volume, so the growth hire does not trigger a plan renegotiation.

How does Strkr handle the retainer-plus-project revenue blend?

Native Products is built for both revenue shapes on the same quote. A retainer line item carries a monthly fee, a scope ladder (hours or deliverables per month), a renewal date, and a usage-based add-on for over-scope hours. A project line item carries a fixed fee or a time-and-materials shape with a scope and a delivery window. The quote the founder sends matches the invoice the client receives, so the AR reconciliation stops being a Sheet. The forecast picks up both revenue shapes: retainer MRR rolls to a recurring line and project revenue rolls to the weighted pipeline against the quarter target. The founder sees the retainer book total, the renewal cliff, the project backlog, and the receivable health on one view, and the Monday cash call becomes a live surface instead of a Sunday-night rebuild.

How does the first AE or AM handoff work from a founder-led pipeline?

The first revenue hire handoff is a known shape of pain in agencies, and Strkr treats it as a record transfer rather than a knowledge transfer. The founder reassigns accounts in the pipeline view, and the full history travels: every email, every call, every stage change, every SOW version, every project note, every renewal check-in, and the Strkr AI summary of where the relationship is and why. The new hire opens the account on day one and sees context that used to live in Slack DMs. The two-week ramp shrinks to a one-day onboarding review, and the quiet signals stay with the account.

How does Projects fit a 10-to-50-person creative or marketing shop?

Strkr Projects runs the delivery board for every signed engagement on the same workspace as the pipeline and the Products book. Issues, sprints, assignees, burndown, and capacity reporting all live on the project record. The founder opens the account and sees the pipeline, the signed SOW, the Products line items, the live project burndown, and the delivery team utilization on one screen. The delivery lead runs the day-to-day in Projects, and the founder reviews on the same surface. Capacity reporting across the delivery team by role shows the utilization cliff before the next closed-won email, so the hiring plan triggers on a real number instead of a late project. The project tool stops being a Notion board that nobody updates and becomes a system that is the delivery team daily surface.

What does Strkr AI actually do for an agency founder day?

Strkr AI shows up on four surfaces an agency founder lives in every week. It drafts proposals from discovery notes, the quoted retainer tier, and prior SOWs, so the two-hour Sunday proposal ritual shrinks to a twenty-minute Friday review. It flags retainers at risk by reading project burndown, reply sentiment, gap-to-next check-in, and overage history, so the save conversation happens on week eight of the quarter. It drafts case studies from project notes and before-and-after metrics the moment an engagement delivers results. And it summarizes the state of every account for the first AE or AM handoff.

Can Strkr grow with us from 10 to 50 people and beyond?

Yes. The same workspace that handles a founder with a dozen deals and five retainers handles a 50-person agency with a sales lead, three AMs, a delivery director, a growth marketer, and an ops lead. Role-based saved views, custom fields, Flows, permissions, Products catalogs, and the native forecast all scale up with the team. The CRM you set up at 10 people is the CRM you run at 50, and the migration cost that otherwise hits mid-growth never happens because the schema already supports the roles.

Also considering

Related combinations.

Agency Account Executives Agency Sales Managers Agency Account Managers Agency Marketing Managers SaaS Founders Consulting Firm Account Executives

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