Hi,

Hope you're all having a great day!

I'm trying to get to the stage where I can run a digital marketing agency and using Upwork to get clients. I currently do mostly analytics, but offer all aspects of marketing.

I'm quite experienced in my industry having worked in leadership positions at many different companies, startups and fortune 500 companies. I realise that many agencies are going the niche route (e.g. real estate digital agency), however, I don't feel I need to given my background and I'm hoping to be able to use my experience to get clients.

I'm finding a few things:

1. Low rates (less than 30$ perhour for work that is normally worth at least $70-$100 an hour). This has changed and gone down a lot from say 2 years ago.

2. It's hard to get enough work for an agency

3. Much of the work consists of short, fixed projects (not a retainer)

4. Clients do not have big budgets (much shopify, wordpress work etc)

After all this, I'm wondering whether this is just not sustainable to set up an agency using Upwork to build a client base and that I may need to find leads from elsewhere?

Since I work in digital marketing my thoughts were to do SEO mainly because thats the best way of getting a retainer. With PPC, the clients simply dont seem to have the budgets and Analytics is not regular work. Email marketing also seems to be a possibility. Not much else.

Did you manage to build an agency on Upwork?

Did you manage to break the yearly 200k barrier on your own enough to earn more than a day job and enough to pay staff to build the agency?

Any thoughts from people who have been in a similar boat would be much appreciated.

Cheers

Currently I brand myself as an agency and have developed a multi-service offering spread across everything from digital, to ecommerce sites, marketing and branding.

I’m looking to grow in each service and rely on the freelancers (maybe via Upwork) as subcontractors, vetting them - to clients they’ll appear as part of the team.

I know agencies work this way but is it still a viable option, or do good freelancers charge too much for the agency to be price competitive (after adding a markup), avoid working for remote agencies and prefer to go direct to clients?

Does this model work against in house teams?