6 Ways to Generate Recurring Revenue with Your Agency

The dream of every agency owner is to break the "feast or famine" cycle of running an agency. You get a lot of projects one month, which are followed up by months of dry work.

Having recurring revenue streams for your agency can give you peace of mind but also more predictability to your business, and help you make long term decisions.

In this post we will explore some ideas of recurring revenue models you can implement today at your agency.

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5 benefits of recurring revenue for agencies:

Having recurring income has multiple advantages for your agency:

• More  predictability: Month after month, you will more or less know how much revenue you can expect to generate. This gives you a long term outlook for your business decisions.
  
• Client retention: You can build long-term relationships with your clients.
  
• Easier to sell: You can productize your service and get clients to pay you on a monthly/quarterly basis vs. a big upfront payment.
  
• Increase business value: If you want to decide to sell your business one day, having revenue predictability will help boost your agency or productized service valuation.
  
• Less stress: No more chasing invoices, and a predictable income to pay you and your team salaries.

Let's dive right in and explore 6 ways to generate recurring revenue as an agency owner:

1. Turnkey websites

One of the most popular models to generate recurring revenue is to offer done-for-you websites.

Pick a niche (example: Lawyer, Accountants, Dentists, Plumbers) and make a website for them for a one-time fee, a flat monthly fee, or a mix of both.

In addition, you can then upsell them with ancillary services such as SEO, content writing, reputation management, etc.

Examples of Turnkey Websites services

TheChurchCo

TheChurchCo builds websites for churches starting at $20/month.

They grew to an impressive $60000 in monthly recurring revenue by focusing on a niche: Websites for Churches.

They picked a niche, identified a problem, and packaged their service to address it.

AgentFire

AgentFire builds websites for real estate agents starting at $129/month. They also have different add-ons they offer to their customers such as marketing and content writing services.

Pros and Cons of offering Turnkey Websites services

Pros:

• Easy to operate: There's not much technical expertise needed. Most of the platforms to build your clients website are no-code or low-code (Wordpress, Webflow, Squarespace, ...)
• You can upsell your clients with additional services such as social media mangement, CRM set up, email marketing, SEO, etc.
• Potentially low churn businesses, since your clients will mostly always need their websites to be live.
• High margins: You can re-use templates to go faster.

Cons:

• Lots of competition: Many businesses might just want to do it themselves. However, if you niche down and understand well the problems of a specific industry you can come with a compelling value proposition.
• Some small businesses might not have the funds.

2. Subscription-based services

Another way to generate recurring revenue is to package your services and offer them on a subscription basis.

Here are some examples of services:

• Graphic design (we wrote a guide on how to start a subscription-based graphic design service)
• Content writing
• Social Media Management

Examples of subscription-based services

Hatchly

Hatchly is a subscription-based design service based in the UK. They created 3 plans where they offer designs with a 1-2 day turnaround for a flat monthly fee.

This is great for brands and teams that need graphic design done on a recurring basis.

MangoSocial

Another example is Mango Social Co. For a flat monthly fee starting at $97/month, they create custom social media posts.

Pros and Cons of offering subscription-based services:

Pros:

• Build long term relationships with customers.
• You can predict your costs and build a team to fulfil the service.

Cons:

• You need to set expectations clearly with your clients so that they are satisfied.
• No other major cons

3. Maintenance services

Maintenance services were one of the first models of productized service created, with WPCurve (which got acquired by GoDaddy)

Examples of maintenance services

WPBuffs

One of such examples is WPBuffs, who recently crossed $1m ARR. They take the hassle of managing, updating a website for a flat monthly fee.

Pros and Cons of offering maintenances services:

Pros:

• Tasks are usually relatively simple and thus closed fast. There's not a lot back and forth or long projectss.
• A small team can manage a lot of clients since tasks are simple.
• You can white label your services to other agencies.
• Potentially low churn business as well.

Cons:

• The monthly fee for those services is usually a bit lower than other services (for example design or content writing) so you will need to acquire a lot of customers.

4. Coaching and consulting services

Another way to generate recurring revenue for your agency is to offer some consulting.

Here are some examples of services:

• Facebook Ads
• SEO strategy
• Lead generation
• Consulting for a specific tool / platform (Hubspot, Salesforce, Active Campaign, Klaviyo, ...)

Examples of coaching and consulting services

GetRhys

GetRhys is a monthly consulting service that focuses on delivering SaaS marketing advice. The pricing is $395/month.

Pros and Cons of offering coaching services:

Pros:

• You build a personal relationship with clients and you can know their needs better.
• You can up-sell your clients to other services you provide or partner with other agencies and freelacners.
• Easy to get started (one landing page, and a booking form usually suffice)
• No team to manage, which is great if you want to run a solo business.

Cons:

• Harder to scale since you are effectively selling your time.

5. Reseller and affiliates

This one is a less obvious way to generate recurring revenue but can bring decent income as well.

Here are some ways to generate recurring via commissions:

• If you run an accounting service, you can get paid a commission to set up customers
• Hosting (for example offering websites + hosting)

In addition, you can also partner with other firms. For example:

• If your service sells content writing, you can partner up with a firm to offer link building or graphic design service.
• You run an incorporation service and partner with an accounting firm

6. Payment plans

Finally, you can simply offer one-off services and break down the payment into various payment plans.

For example, instead of offering a website plan with a 3 months payment, break it down further in a 6 months or 12 months payment.

Want to start offering recurring services?

ManyRequests is a platform we built to run your entire agency or productized service.

You can manage clients and tasks but also create one-off and recurring subscriptions to bill your clients.