Creative agency work runs on three parallel tracks: new business, active projects, and retainer renewals. Strkr pulls each track onto one card so account directors can see the full relationship without stitching Monday boards, QuickBooks exports, and Gmail threads.
Creative agencies rarely struggle with great work. They struggle with the business of making great work predictable. Billable utilization, scope creep, retainer renewal timing, and the handoff between the pitch team and the production team are the four surfaces that separate agencies that scale from agencies that burn out. The five pain points below are what we hear from agency founders on intake calls.
The pitch team sold a 14-week brand identity engagement with three concepts and two rounds of revision. The production team opens the project with "two concepts and one round" because that is what the SOW template defaulted to. Strkr ties the pitch deck, the signed SOW, and the project brief to the same account record so the handoff cannot drop scope.
The client asks for "one small tweak" and gets three extra rounds. The account director does not catch it until the project goes 32 percent over budget. Strkr tracks approved scope versus delivered scope at the deliverable level with an alert when burn rate exceeds the budget pace. The account director can have the scope conversation at round three, not at post-mortem.
Agency billable utilization lives in a time tracker (Harvest, Toggl, Everhour). The CRM does not see it. The result: an account director cannot tell whether the senior designer is actually billable this quarter or is burning on internal rebrand work. Strkr pulls time-tracker data through the webhook API and prints billable utilization on the person record.
Retainer agreements auto-renew in some cases and lapse quietly in others. The partner thinks the client is on month 11 of 12. The client thinks the retainer ended two months ago. Strkr tracks every retainer with explicit renewal date, auto-renew flag, and 60 or 30 day pre-renewal alerts to the account director.
Agency new-business pipeline has distinct stages (inbound inquiry, qualification call, chemistry meeting, RFP response, pitch presentation, contract, closed-won) and most generic CRMs do not model the discipline. Strkr ships an agency pipeline template that reflects how pitches actually move, with Strkr AI drafting the follow-up email at each stage.
The agency account view is designed to answer the three questions an account director asks every morning: what is open with this client, what is at risk, and what is coming up for renewal. The cards below are the pieces of that answer.
The active projects list shows each project in flight with budgeted hours, actual hours (from the time tracker), burn rate (percent complete versus percent budget consumed), and target delivery date. Projects over 90 percent burn with less than 85 percent complete show a red chip.
Agencies that run new-business work with existing clients see every open pitch on the account record with stage, expected close date, and estimated value. A single account can have an active project, a retainer, and an open pitch for a new engagement all visible at once.
The retainer card shows monthly commitment, actual utilization against the commitment, carry-over hours, renewal date, and auto-renew flag. A retainer in month 10 of 12 with 42 percent utilization triggers an account director alert so the renewal conversation starts from reality.
The chronological thread shows every email, SMS, call note, and meeting across every contact on the account. The account director can review the past 30 days in two minutes without opening five email threads.
The team card shows the people assigned to the account with role (account director, strategist, creative lead, designer, developer) and allocation (percent of each person's week on this account). The partner can see team load across accounts without pulling a staffing report.
The lifetime-value chip shows total billings from this account across every engagement in Strkr's record. For agencies that run multi-year relationships with the same client the number ties to the renewal conversation and the pitch strategy.
Agency new-business pipeline is not a simple seven-stage SaaS funnel. The stages below are what Strkr ships as the agency template, with the exit criteria that keep pitches moving.
Inbound inquiries land in the pipeline through the website form, email forwarding, or manual entry. The brief and attached RFP document attach to the record. Strkr AI drafts a qualifying reply tailored to the inquiry type (RFP response versus referral introduction versus cold inbound).
The qualification call captures budget range, project timeline, decision maker, decision process, and competitive context on the opportunity record. Strkr AI drafts the recap email from the call summary. The qualification output drives whether the opportunity moves to chemistry or gets politely declined.
The chemistry meeting captures stakeholder names, personality notes, aesthetic preferences, and the words the prospect used to describe their brand. The output grounds the pitch deck in the client's own language rather than generic agency positioning.
For RFP opportunities Strkr tracks response status, assigned writer, due date, and competitive context. The playbook is to produce the strongest two sections and the required rest. Strkr AI drafts the executive summary and competitive-differentiator sections grounded in the account history.
The pitch stage holds the deck, the team roster for the pitch meeting, the prep notes, and the follow-up list. Strkr AI drafts a prep brief for the pitch team the morning of the pitch and a follow-up email the afternoon of the pitch grounded in the live meeting notes.
Contract stage captures the signed SOW, the final scope, the payment schedule, and the kickoff date. On close the opportunity closes-won, the project record is created with the SOW as the ground truth, and the production team gets the handoff with every artifact in place.
The post-sold work is where agencies either make margin or lose it. Strkr's project and retainer tooling tracks the surfaces that matter: scope, burn, utilization, and renewal.
A project in Strkr ties to the account, carries the signed SOW, lists the assigned team, holds the timeline with milestones, and tracks budget versus actual. The project view ships with a Gantt layout for timeline-heavy work and a Kanban layout for sprint-style work.
Deliverables (brand concept, website wireframe, video edit, social asset set) track status (brief, in production, in review, approved, delivered) with the client-facing review tool linked. Scope-creep requests surface as new deliverables tied to a change-order record, not as free work.
The time tracker tie through the webhook API syncs hours per person per project daily. The project record shows actual hours against budget. The utilization report shows billable percentage per team member against target. Partners see margin per project without a monthly spreadsheet reconcile.
A retainer in Strkr is a child record of the account with monthly commitment hours or dollars, carry-over policy, renewal date, auto-renew flag, and historical utilization. The partner sees retainer health across every active client on one report.
When the client asks for work outside the signed scope the account director creates a change-order record. The record captures the request, the estimated effort, the pricing, and the client approval status. The flow builder routes the change order to the client for signature and the production team for scheduling.
At project close Strkr runs a retrospective: budget versus actual, timeline versus actual, scope-creep count, team satisfaction. The retrospective feeds the pricing calibration for the next pitch to a similar client. Strkr AI drafts a two-paragraph summary for the partner review.
Many creative agencies run three to five tools: a CRM for new business, Monday or Asana for projects, Harvest or Toggl for time, QuickBooks or Xero for billing, and a shared Google Drive for creative assets. The comparison below is Strkr's single-tool posture versus the bolted stack applied to the same agency.
| Feature | Strkr | Bolted agency stack |
|---|---|---|
| Pitch and project on the same account | One account record. | CRM plus project tool with manual sync. |
| Scope-creep tracking | Change-order workflow built in. | Email thread and informal tracking. |
| Retainer renewal alerts | 60 and 30 day pre-renewal nudges. | Calendar reminder if someone sets it. |
| Billable utilization in the CRM | Time-tracker webhook sync. | Spreadsheet reconcile monthly. |
| SOW and signed contract on the record | Attached to the opportunity. | Lives in Dropbox or a shared drive. |
| AI drafting for pitch follow-up | Strkr AI in the firm voice. | None. |
| HIPAA BAA for healthcare agency clients | Available on request. | Enterprise tier typical gate. |
| Pricing | 29 to 119 dollars per seat. | Four tools often stacking past 2,000 dollars per month. |
The playbooks below are deployment patterns Strkr's onboarding team sees on creative agency migrations, from boutique four-person studios to 60-person integrated agencies.
A four-person branding studio in Brooklyn ran new business in HubSpot, projects in Notion, time in Harvest, and billing in QuickBooks. The founder spent eight hours per week stitching the four systems. Strkr onboarding ran a nine-business-day migration. HubSpot retired, Notion kept for internal docs, Harvest and QuickBooks integrated through webhooks. The founder recovered six hours per week.
A 24-person integrated agency in Austin ran a Salesforce instance that had bloated to 180 custom fields over four years. Projects lived in Monday and nobody trusted the forecast. Strkr onboarding ran a 22-business-day migration, archived 142 unused fields, and consolidated projects into the Strkr project record. New-business forecast accuracy improved from under 50 percent to 78 percent in the first full quarter.
A 60-person video production house with 11 active retainers and 42 active one-off projects needed utilization visibility across departments. Strkr's project record, retainer object, and time-tracker tie gave the partners weekly utilization reports by department. The scheduling bottlenecks moved from guesswork to data. Billable utilization improved from 61 percent to 73 percent in six months.
An 11-person growth agency with 90 percent of revenue in monthly retainers needed retainer renewal visibility and churn prediction. Strkr's retainer object and the AI utilization risk signal flagged four retainers at renewal risk in Q2. The partner addressed three with a scope conversation and renewed them. One churned anyway. Net revenue retention improved by 14 points.
Book a 30 minute call. We will walk through the account view, the pitch pipeline, the project record, and the retainer workflow with your actual accounts.
Strkr has native project record capability that most agencies use instead of a separate project tool. For agencies that want to keep Monday, Asana, or ClickUp Strkr integrates through the webhook API with bidirectional sync on project status, task completion, and assignee changes. The published OpenAPI spec covers the sync surface. Teams typically find that Strkr's native project record handles 80 to 90 percent of what the dedicated tool did at the cost of running two tools.
Strkr does not run a native time tracker today. The team can tie Strkr to Harvest, Toggl, Everhour, or Clockify through the webhook API. The time-tracker data lands on the project record and the person record so burn rate and billable utilization are visible in the CRM without a monthly export. A native time tracker is on the roadmap but no committed ship date.
Strkr does not store large creative files natively. Agencies continue to use Google Drive, Dropbox, Figma, or Frame.io for asset storage with links attached to the Strkr project record. The link surface preserves version control from the asset tool while surfacing the current asset on the project view. For teams that want to retire a separate asset tool entirely the roadmap includes native asset management but no ship date.
A 20-person agency on the Pro tier at 59 dollars per seat runs 1,180 dollars per month base. The AI Enhancement module is a 49-dollar flat add-on with 5,000 Strkr AI calls included and 0.012 dollars per call over cap. The 14-day free trial covers every feature. There is no project-count fee, no retainer-count fee, and no asset-storage tier.
Strkr runs multi-tenancy with office locations as a tag on the user record, which drives segment reporting and territory assignment. The role model scopes visibility per office if the partners want strict separation. For agencies with distinct brand entities (a parent agency and an acquired sub-brand) each brand runs as its own tenant with cross-tenant admin access for the parent operations team.
Strkr ships a quote and proposal workflow with templates, electronic signature, and version control. The proposal attaches to the opportunity record and the signed version becomes the ground truth for the project scope. For agencies with established proposal tools (Qwilr, Proposify, PandaDoc) Strkr integrates through the webhook API with bidirectional status sync.
Each retainer has a renewal date, an auto-renew flag, and alert thresholds (60 and 30 days by default, tunable). At the alert threshold Strkr notifies the assigned account director with a utilization summary and the auto-generated renewal conversation agenda. Strkr AI drafts a renewal proposal grounded in the utilization history and the account roadmap. The retainer closes as renewed, expanded, or churned with the outcome logged for the quarterly review.
No sales call, no migration consultant, no four-month implementation. Enter your card, get 14 days of the full Pro tier, cancel any time before day 14 with zero charge. Spin up a workspace, import your CSV, and have something useful before lunch.
