for UK marketing agencies
AI workflow assessment for UK marketing agencies - find the admin eating your retainer margin.
Agencies audit everybody else's marketing, so this is 60 minutes spent auditing your own delivery - client reporting, scope creep, timesheets and project admin, the pitch that eats a Friday. The report is ordered by what protects the most margin, with the setup for each recommendation written out step by step.
The delivery admin that quietly eats a fixed retainer.
You price the retainer on the work. Then the margin leaks to everything around it: the monthly performance deck nobody costed into the fee, the out-of-scope favours nobody logged, the PM board that needs tidying and the timesheets that need nudging, and the new-business pitch that eats a Friday and might come to nothing.
None of it is the creative or the strategy the client is paying for, but all of it has to happen - and it is the reason a healthy retainer turns thin, the reason your best people are in admin instead of on the work, and the reason the agency struggles to scale without hiring account managers first. Nobody ever decides to give that margin away. It goes in small pieces nobody logs, while the fee stays exactly where it was the day you agreed it.
So the assessment turns the diagnostic on the agency itself: 60 minutes on your own delivery, then a plan ordered by what protects the most margin. Agencies are fluent in AI tools and still lose the first week of every month to reporting, so we start from where the hours go rather than from what is installed.
The reporting and project admin that thins out a retainer - and what it is worth fixing.
An average would not survive contact with your agency. A content shop loses time somewhere different to a paid-media team, and one oversized retainer changes the shape again. The jobs that drain agencies are consistent enough to name, though: client reporting, scope creep, timesheets and project admin, and the pitch treadmill.
So the session measures rather than assumes. We take last month's reporting round and one retainer you suspect is thinner than it should be, work out how many hours went into each, and how many of those hours were ever costed into the fee. The report ranks whatever that turns up.
Run your own numbers in the admin cost calculator, or read the full breakdown in the CRM and workflow gaps that cost UK service businesses.
The assessment is £799 - and the margin it finds is leaking out of your own retainers.
Your six biggest time sinks - and what we do about each one.
We map your whole agency in the 60-minute session, then work backwards to the drains worth fixing first. Here is how that lands on the specific admin marketing agencies feel.
Client reporting and dashboards
The monthly performance deck - pulling numbers from Google Analytics, Meta, the ad platforms and the CRM, then writing the commentary that makes it make sense - for every client, every month. We take last month's reporting round and split it into pulling numbers, formatting, and writing the part that says what the numbers mean. Only the last of those is what the client is paying for.
Retainer scope creep
The quick favour, the extra revision, the out-of-hours request that never made it onto a scope. It never gets logged, so it never gets billed - and it is where the margin goes. We go back through one retainer with you and find the work that was done and never recorded, because making it visible has to come before deciding whether to bill it.
Timesheets and project admin
Chasing the team to fill in timesheets, moving cards across the PM board, keeping statuses and task lists current across Asana, Monday or ClickUp. Unglamorous, and the agency loses track of profitability without it. We look at what the PM board is genuinely used for, and how much of the tidying exists to keep a report accurate rather than to keep work moving.
Pitches and proposals
Every opportunity needs a tailored proposal or pitch deck - approach, deliverables, timeline, price - and plenty of them never turn into an account. We compare a pitch you won with one you lost and see how many pages were identical in both. Identical pages are assembly, and assembly can be drafted.
Client feedback, approvals and revisions
The approval chase, the feedback that arrives in five places, the revision round nobody scoped. We follow one project's feedback round across every channel it arrived on, and count how many times somebody had to ask again.
Recurring content and campaign admin
The repeatable production work - resizing for every channel, scheduling, tagging, the campaign QA checklist - that has to happen on every job. We list one campaign's production steps and mark which were decisions and which were resizing, tagging and ticking a checklist. Only the second kind is safe to shrink.
What this is - and what it isn’t.
The assessment is a diagnostic and a plan. Within two working days of your call you get a passcode-protected report: the AI and automation opportunities we have found for your agency, named tools with costs and setup time, step-by-step recipes, a prompt library, an impact-versus-effort ranking, and ROI worked out on your real numbers. It is written in plain English so you can act on it - no technical background needed.
It is guidance, not us doing the work for you. If the report flags something worth building - a client-reporting agent, say - the Custom AI Agent Build is a separate product from £949, scoped case by case. If you would rather implement the report’s quick wins yourself with someone beside you, the Implementation Kickstart (£349, 90 minutes) is there for that. The assessment always comes first.
The kind of result we publish.
Real clients, in their own words - the full story, what we found, and the measurable change in their week.
“Knowing something and doing something are completely different things.”
Questions marketing agencies ask us.
We handle confidential client data and accounts. Is it safe to use AI tools?
Will AI-written reports and pitches sound generic and hurt the client relationship?
We already use ChatGPT and a PM tool. What is left to find?
Is £799 worth it for a small agency?
One payment. A written plan,
a video walkthrough, and someone
checking in to make sure it happens.
A diagnostic session, personalised report, video walkthrough, and follow-up support. One payment, no ongoing costs.
Find out where your agency's hours actually go.
Book a 60-minute diagnostic. Get a report built around your agency within two working days, a video walkthrough, and follow-up support. Money back if it doesn't show at least 5 hours a week worth reclaiming.
Book your assessment →