Building a Strong Foundation With Flywheel Growth Suite
Handyman Marketing Pros relies on Flywheel Growth Suite to streamline services, increase MRR, and bring goodness to its growing list of clients.
Industry: Digital Marketing
Site: handymanmarketingpros.com
Challenge: Manage agency clients and their websites while experiencing a surge in new business. Consolidate multiple tools to streamline workflows and create more efficient internal processes.
Solution: Flywheel Growth Suite provides a framework for Handyman Marketing Pros to track MRR, manage its clients’ WordPress sites, and make processes easier for both internal team members and new clients signing up for services.
Results: Effective and predictable growth; In 2021, Handyman Marketing Pros experienced a more than 60% increase in monthly recurring revenue. Average revenue per customer has more than doubled, and the agency continues to forecast increases in revenue since switching to Flywheel Growth Suite.
Handyman Marketing Pros is one of Northern California’s fastest-growing niche agencies serving the needs of handymen and home improvement contractors. The agency builds and optimizes websites, using WordPress to increase visibility, find qualified leads, and increase revenue for its clients.
“A lot of agencies cobble together different tools from individual vendors and solutions, and having them all under one roof is just such a game-changer. Flywheel Growth Suite is easily the most important piece of technology in my business.”
—Jason Call, Founder, Handyman Marketing Pros
Laying the Groundwork for Success
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 Flywheel Growth Suite to support their business through it all.
Built specifically to help freelancers and small creative agencies grow at scale, the platform 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.
“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 Flywheel 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.
Moving Away From Project-to-Project
With a good handle on the work his agency was already doing, Call went into growth mode, leveraging Flywheel Growth Suite to zero in on recurring revenue while packaging up services that would help foster it.
“To put it simply, Flywheel 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.”
In addition to streamlining services and facilitating MRR, Flywheel 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.
That ease and simplicity extend to the client-side thanks to quick payment options via Stripe. A customer signs up for a plan, and after a one-time setup, they receive a confirmation email.
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 Flywheel Growth Suite really is.”
The Results
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) in 2021.
With a rebranding project complete and new services for SEO and Google Ads, Handyman Marketing Pros has increased MRR $1,000 each month for six months in 2021, 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.
“Flywheel 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. This solution has helped us get really clear on our service packages, which in turn has been a huge part of our growth.”
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 personalized 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!”
The personalized dashboard in Flywheel Growth Suite 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 Flywheel 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 Flywheel 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 Flywheel Growth Suite,” he said.
“If you work with WordPress—which you should—Flywheel 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.”
“Flywheel Growth Suite has made my life so much easier, and it just makes sense as an excellent way to grow your business.”