Building a Solid Foundation for Growth

What began in 2017 as a Christmas gift for a friend has blossomed into one of Northern California’s fastest-growing digital marketing agencies.

Handyman Marketing Pros, which provides digital marketing services to handyman and home improvement contractors, has experienced tremendous growth in just a few short years, fueled by an unwavering commitment to client success and the use of Growth Suite to support their business through it all.

Built specifically to help freelancers and creative agencies grow at scale, Growth Suite brings WordPress hosting, subscription billing, and client management into a single, user-friendly dashboard, allowing users to see trends and understand revenue streams in more detail.

For Handyman Marketing Pros Founder Jason Call, this combination of tools and services has been a key ingredient to his agency’s success, including a more than 60% increase in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) since the start of 2021.

“When we first started out, we were working project-to-project, always looking for that next website as bills were coming in, ” Call said. “Figuring out how to generate recurring revenue just seemed like this gray, foggy area.”

Ongoing frustrations with discount hosts like GoDaddy and Bluehost didn’t help, and in 2018, after hearing about White Label (an early iteration of Growth Suite), Call decided to change things up and give it a try.

“I signed up for a freelancer plan, and with tools like automated billing to handle the finance side, and the ability to easily launch new sites and transfer over site templates on the production side, it was like, “pinch me, this makes my life so much easier,” he said. 

With a good handle on the work his agency was already doing, Call went into growth mode, leveraging Growth Suite to zero in on recurring revenue while packaging up services that would help foster it. 

“To put it simply, Growth Suite has enabled MRR,” Call said. “From the systems I need to the user experience my customers have, it’s integrated very smoothly into my existing processes and made it easy to get paid every month.” 

That ease and simplicity extends to the client-side too. With quick payment options via Stripe, a customer signs up for a plan, and after a one-time setup, they receive a confirmation email. From there, they are automatically added into Handyman Marketing Pros’ Growth Suite dashboard, and Call receives his favorite type of email: 

Those emails used to trickle in, Call said, but over the past year, they’ve become a daily, if not hourly occurrence. With a rebranding project complete and new services for SEO and Google Ads, Handyman Marketing Pros has increased MRR $1,000 each month for the last six months, with no sign of letting up. 

A huge catalyst behind this recent surge has been a coaching program geared specifically to agency owners Call joined towards the end of 2020. With new connections and leads coming in, Handyman Marketing Pros has been well-positioned to capitalize on all of the new activity.  

“Growth Suite has made it really easy to capture new revenue and help us set and solidify our marketing systems,” Call said. “We provide services for a niche industry and we know exactly what the best marketing solutions are for our clients. Growth Suite has helped us get really clear on our service packages, which in turn has been a huge part of our growth.” 

In addition to streamlining services and facilitating MRR, Growth Suite also plays a pivotal role in speeding up the onboarding process for Handyman Marketing Pros’ new clients — a major departure from the agency’s old days with discount hosts. 

Once a plan has been selected and/or a contract has been signed, Call estimates that it takes between three and five minutes to set up a new client profile, spin up a site, and create an invoice — all with just a few clicks.     

“This is such a difference from the experience I had with Bluehost or GoDaddy,” Call said. “The onboarding process used to take up a huge chunk of time, and trying to navigate the random reseller products and all the various issues that come up, it just drives home how much of a no-brainer using Growth Suite really is.” 

As his agency continues to grow, Call keeps a close eye on total revenue growth as well as average revenue per client (ARPC) — both of which are easily visible in the Growth Suite dashboard, allowing for both a macro view of overall business trends as well as a more detailed look at the way each client plays a part.

“Our biggest goal this year was to raise the average MRR per client,’ Call said, “and with this clear view into our revenue stream, combined with our new service packages, we’ve been able to do just that — we’ve actually more than doubled our ARPC from $45-50 at the end of 2020 to $110 today!”

Another benefit of Growth Suite is the Growth Dashboard, which provides the ability to quickly view the payment status for each individual client, including upcoming, pending, and outstanding payments. In addition to assisting with unpaid invoices, this has helped Call and his team tackle the nagging pain point of expired payment information, which had previously been a semi-monthly occurrence.  

“We have more than 100 subscription-based clients and every few months, a handful of them need to update their payment info,” he said. “This used to be something that would pile up and we’d have to react. Now, we have a templated process in place, based around Growth Suite, which helps us stay on top of all client payments and proactively reach out when things need to be updated.” 

As new clients and projects continue to flow in — Handyman Marketing Pros’ MRR is forecast to further increase more than 20% over the next six months — Call noted that it’s not one feature over another that makes Growth Suite such an integral part of his business, it’s the entire suite of tools, under one roof, which has made a lasting impact on his agency. 

“From that clear view of revenue, to hosting and production tools, to all of the awesome billing and client management solutions it includes, we could not have grown the way we have without Growth Suite,” he said. 

“If you work with WordPress — which you should — Growth Suite is simply worth it, on a per-site basis, and overall. If you’re really serving your clients and looking out for their best interests, you shouldn’t run their sites on a discount host and you shouldn’t manage them with a bunch of disparate solutions.”

“Growth Suite has made my life so much easier, and it just makes sense as an excellent way to grow your business.”

Find out more about Growth Suite and start zeroing in on MRR today!