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Digital Agency Playbook
A playbook for agencies
Business model
Workflows
Agency Team
Clients
Estimates
Projects
Retainers
Tasks
Resourcing
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Workflows

The steps of running an agency operation
Workflows are the backbone of how an agency operates, the process in which a new person you meet becomes your client. Dreamed up projects become launched work like a website.
Now, there's no way to capture all the small movements of how work gets done or how you win over new clients, but these steps are a common frame of how things happens. What's great about Coda is that you get to make something that maps to how you want the agency to run. Take these suggestions as merely suggestions ーsomething to show what can be done and general enough to give you an idea of how things fit together.
The following tables you see here for project, tasks, and client statuses are referenced in other parts within this playbook. Make updates here, and they will update where they are referenced (you can hover over the table title and click the link icon to follow the reference flow).
Projects
Before a project is born, it's an idea through interactions with a client. Some agencies like to track a full sales pipeline with this work; I'm keeping it simple here and moving a project status up the new business pipeline to capture potential work.
Status Projects
0
Status Name
Description
1
💜 Potential
In discussion about doing this work with the client.
2
🖋 In Proposal
Business development is confirming the
@SOW
⁠
, client needs, and estimate. The key part of this phase is to get a proposal in the hands of the client and have them sign off and confirm.
3
🔖 Soft Book
We'll start gathering the people involved, writing the project brief, and confirming dates internally and with the client.
4
🚜 Active
Active is all-encompassing for an ongoing project, so you may want to break out into a few more stages such as Design, Development, QA.
5
✋ On Hold
Something happened to make it no longer active. We're waiting on a third party to get back to us, it's on the client's plate to finish, it's no longer relevant.
6
🚀 Complete
We've launched whatever we're building: website is live, campaign is sending emails, systems are up and running, ads are being served.
There are no rows in this table
⁠
Tasks
These are desecrate things that the team is doing with a rough estimate on timeline and effort. Tasks usually form the steps for a project to go from writing the brief to testing and launch, though they can fall outside of that flow like one-off client asks. Sometimes tasks are separately classified as an issue, ticket, or bug, but I'm keeping it simple here.

Status Tasks
0
Status Name
Description
1
Pending
Scheduling out in the future, something coming in, a client request that they've submitted.
2
Active
Actively working on the task.
3
On Hold
Something happened to make it no longer active. We're waiting on a third party to get back to us, it's on the client's plate to finish, it's no longer relevant.
4
Complete
We're done with this body of work. Great job!
There are no rows in this table
⁠
Clients
Each client goes through their own lifecycle, mostly mapping back to their engagement through projects.
Status Clients
0
Status Name
Description
1
Lead
Someone we met at a conference, got referred to, we thought would be a good fit.
2
Potential
Engaging in conversations about working with us.
3
Active
A paying client.
4
In-active
No longer a paying client. Project ended, canceled their retainer. Showing no interested in doing more work with us in the near future.
There are no rows in this table
⁠
Feelings
This is a list that's used in a few trackers, like the Project Roundup.
Feeling
0
Feeling
Title
Description
1
🤑
Green
Full steam ahead, things are going well.
2
😬
Yellow
There's a problem, but we've identified a solution.
3
💩
Red / Brown
There's a problem, and I don't have a solution.
4
🙊
No update
​
There are no rows in this table
⁠

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