7-figure design agency cohort
Welcome to the pre-training
Eight weeks of implementation, one system per week. Every week ends with a real system built, and the last call turns all of it into a 90-day plan.
The one idea
Eight weeks of implementation, one system per week.
You watch a short lesson, load the template, SOP or skill into your AI, and build it for your own agency.
What’s in this lesson
- Why we built this cohort, and why the courses and coaching I paid for never grew my business
- How the lessons work: 5 to 15 minutes each, with the assets you need to implement
- Who’s teaching you: DesignMe today, the team, the AI layer and where our work comes from
- The eight weeks at a glance
The eight systems
- Week 1. Agency brain, the foundation your agency runs on, plus your scoreboard
- Week 2. Positioning, offers, pricing and packaging
- Week 3. Delivery, and how to use AI in it
- Week 4. Sales and existing revenue: account management and retainers
- Week 5. Proof: your website, content engine and inbound leads
- Week 6. Outbound and automations
- Week 7. Team building, the operating system around your team
- Week 8. CEO week, where it all comes together in one agency control room
Every Friday there’s a live call to go through anything you’re stuck on.
What it adds up to
The ability to sell more without working more, take on bigger projects without quality dropping, and step away from delivery without everything depending on you.
Where to start
The next lesson covers how the eight weeks of the training run.
The one idea
Every week builds on the one before it, so the order matters.
Get the foundations in place first, and leads, outbound and scaling start to pay off.
How a week runs
- All lessons for the week drop at once on Saturday, so you have Sunday to Friday to work through them
- Each day has its own short lessons, one to four a day
- Every lesson ends with a task you can implement in your agency right away
- Friday is one bigger build, followed by the live call
- One weekend task pulls the whole week together before the next one starts
The Friday live calls
- 5 pm European time, added to your calendar in your own time zone
- Bring your messy version of what you’ve built, a real deal, a proposal or a page you’re working on
- Send your questions through the form by Thursday if you can’t make it
- Every call is recorded
The eight weeks
- Week 1. Agency brain: your voice and context, plus your pipeline tracked in Attio
- Week 2. Positioning, packaged offers and your rate card
- Week 3. Delivery: onboarding, client communication, quality control and handover
- Week 4. Sales and existing revenue: client audits, retainers, the sales call and proposal
- Week 5. Proof: case studies, your website, the intake funnel and content
- Week 6. Outbound, bots and automations, connected to your scoreboard
- Week 7. Team: who to hire, what to pay, how to test, and what gets decided without you
- Week 8. CEO week: the scoreboard, the monthly finance review, every bot I run and your plan for the next 3 to 12 months
After week 8
The Skool community stays open until February, and more skills from the vault unlock week by week.
We’ll take a short break over Christmas and make it up after New Year.
Your task
Block one to two hours a day in your calendar for the lessons, and block your Fridays for the live calls.
Where to start
The next lesson covers what you need to have ready before week 1 starts.
The one idea
Get four things ready before week 1, so from Monday you can start building instead of hunting for information.
1. Your numbers
- Leads from the last three months, and where they came from
- How many you closed
- What you invoiced month by month
- Active clients and what each one pays you
- Your average project size
Look through your inbox, Stripe or Wise, and your accounting software. If it’s hard to find, that’s the point of the exercise.
2. Your ICP, written down twice
- On the left, your five best clients: who they are, size, funding stage, industry, what they bought and how they found you
- On the right, the 5 to 10 dream clients you want to work with
The gap between the two columns shows where your content and positioning need to go.
3. Your tools
- Claude or Codex on a paid plan
- Wispr Flow, so you can talk to AI instead of typing
- Attio as your CRM
- Read AI or Fireflies to record your calls
- Slack, email and your project tool (Notion, ClickUp or Slack), connected to Claude
- LinkedIn and X, ready to post
You don’t need any of it set up properly yet. Just have the accounts ready, and we’ll set everything up together.
4. One folder
Put your proposals, price sheets, contracts, best projects with numbers, website links and last 10 posts in one Claude project, so the first two weeks build from your real work.
Managing your energy
- Know when your brain works best, and give this training those hours
- Get seven and a half to eight hours of sleep
- Keep moving and go on walks
- Talk through your day in Wispr Flow so AI learns how you think
- Do one thing at a time
One to two hours a day is enough. Three focused hours beat three distracted days.
Your task
Get your numbers ready, write your ICP in two columns, set up access to every tool and put everything in one folder. Bring it all to week 1, with the first live call on November 6.
Where to start
The next lesson covers mindset and why it matters for building an agency that runs without you.
The one idea
Everything we build over the next eight weeks only works if you let go.
Most of us hired ourselves as designers when we needed to be the owner of the business.
The shifts from designer to owner
- A designer does the work. An owner builds the systems and SOPs that show what good looks like
- A designer gets tasks. An owner hands out outcomes and gives people accountability
- A designer saves money. An owner invests it and tracks the KPIs
- A designer measures hours. An owner measures numbers, like profitability per designer
- A designer is needed in every process. An owner can step away for two or three weeks and everything keeps running
What only you should do
Invoices, revisions, status updates, QA, client messages and team questions can all be handed off.
The small circle left is the work only a founder can do. For me right now, that’s sales, content, creative direction and hiring.
Two money rules
- Hire only when you have two or three months of that person’s pay saved
- Put at least 20% of revenue aside for growth and a reserve for leaner months
Your task
Write down everything you did last week, using your calendar. Mark each item as something only you can do, something someone else can do, or something you shouldn’t be doing at all. Keep the list, because we’ll use it in week 7.
Where to start
The next lesson is about playing the long game: where you’re going, how to work backwards from your goals, and why you test one thing at a time.
The one idea
Know where you’re going, break it down into simple numbers, and stay with it long enough to see it working.
A goal you can see
“Grow the agency” isn’t a goal. Pick something real you can picture.
Motivation comes and goes, so the system is what keeps you moving on the weeks you don’t feel like it.
1% better every week
Improve one thing a week: your content, a page where people drop off, your sleep, your focus or your time away from your phone.
Track it, and let it add up over time.
Break the numbers down
I walk through a paid ads example, from cost per client and LTV all the way to how many clients and how much ad spend you’d need for $4M a year.
Four ways to grow
- Raise your prices
- Reduce churn so clients stay longer
- Sell more services to the clients you already have
- Win more clients
Test one thing at a time
Pick one thing you’re good at and focus on it first.
Track it for two to four weeks. If it works, double down. If it doesn’t, move on to the next test.
Your task
Write down a real revenue goal for the next one, two and three years. Then work it backwards into projects, sales calls, upsells and churn. A rough idea is fine.
Where to start
The next lesson shows where we’re taking DesignMe, the steps to get there and how we break it down for ourselves.
The one idea
This is where DesignMe is going, and how we work backwards from the goal. Treat it as an example for your own plan.
The target
About $2M this year and $4M next year. That means going from about $200k a month to about $333k a month.
The biggest change is deal size: moving from $20-50k projects to $50-100k, without needing more volume.
Our four bets
- Offers and positioning: an extension of the design team for funded startups, with clear prices and scope, led by an AI-native angle
- Search: a big bet on SEO and AEO, with a rebuilt site and pages for services, comparisons, industries and locations
- Content: back to agency content after the cohort launches, written for founders and champions at the companies we sell to, with lead magnets on LinkedIn and more video
- Team: a project manager and someone for growth now, then a salesperson and a head of people, with everyone upskilled to be AI native
What isn’t solved yet
Sales still depends on me. I’ll be working on handing it off during the same eight weeks you’re working on your bottlenecks, and I’ll share what happens.
How we’ll know it’s working
Every lead and deal tracked in Attio, one scoreboard checked every morning, one test at a time, and bots tracking everything.
Where to start
The last lesson of the pre-training covers the future of this community.
The one idea
This cohort gets better every week based on what you tell us.
Why this cohort exists
For the last two years, 20 to 30 agency founders a month have asked me for coaching. I never had time for one-to-one calls, so we’re trying a group format first.
If a lesson is missing, something is unclear or you’re stuck, tell us on a live call or post it in the community. We’ll answer it, and we might record a new video for it.
What happens after week 8
There are two options:
- We close the cohort. You keep the training and join the alumni Slack, with a discount on any future cohort
- We turn it into a private, paid monthly community for agency founders, with feedback from us, new lessons on the topics you need, and everything we’re doing behind the scenes
Why it matters
There isn’t a single place right now for agency founders run by people who are still in the business, while AI keeps changing how clients buy and what a team looks like.
You’re the first group in it, and we’ve kept it small so we can go through each of your cases.
Your task
Finish your prep and block your calendar for the Monday kickoff call, which runs about 30 to 40 minutes.
Where to start
Week 1 starts Monday, Nov 2.