I always wanted to build a software development agency. I have a team of 25+ people, having a stable Upwork Agency profile with the revenue I mentioned above, but I am having a hard time scaling the sales more.
I know if any other US or European agency Acquires us, they’ll have the benefit of getting cheaper labour, having a team which is well trained in talking to clients, closing leads and delivering projects. Plus I have rented and furnished a whole physical office where people come on daily basis to work. So they can have it all.
With the client base they can find in US and even with our already well reputed Upwork profile, they’ll be able to secure a lot more projects.
You ask, why won’t you be able to secure more projects if the profile is that good? Because it’s a Pakistani profile. Not sure how unaware you are from reality, but there exists a certain bias towards India/Pakistan/Bangladesh/Nepal. They’ll create their individual US/EU profiles and be added to Agency as owners, and it’ll become a US profile, Top Rated Plus, Expert Vetted, with all good reviews.
What should I do? Should I find someone to acquire? Will anyone be interested in acquiring us and for how much?
Another fact, we have been profitable for every month. The cost is hardly $10k-$18k per month and the revenue per month ranges from $23k-$35k, and that’s in the time when there’s a lot of news of recession.
Points taken. I think generally speaking when you have “bandwidth” in house there are tonnes of things your team may like/want to work on vs you wanting to keep them busy. Not everything has to be revenue generating. There are adjacent activities like contributing to open source, hosting meetups, helping non-profits, etc. Lots of things that look time wasting but have the end result of helping you win new business.
Maybe ask your team what would they like to work on during off peak times and see what they say. There might be a SAAS app sitting on the shelf that some of your team might love working on that could later become a huge business (eg: gmail for google)
Agreed. I have started encouraging people to do personal branding, write blogs and improve our company website. We have done some events in the past, and planning to start doing that again soon.
As for the SaaS, it’s one thing stuck in my mind for a long time now and I have started worked on it. This might be a direction we’ll start taking our team towards.
Really appreciate the thoughtful response 🙌🏼
Cool. One thing to pivot them from working on their own stuff vs stuff that gives you skin in the game is offering them to work offpeak on some startup idea in house. Make a list of 20 things. If it takes off, share the spoils with the founder(s) and spin it off. Track using slicingpie.com. Could be anything from an info product to a full saas.
Basically incentivizing company benefitting activities vs “do anything you like” stuff. They will all end up doing Tiktok videos if you let them decide lol.