SEO agency owner outsourced outbound — and finally had time to actually do SEO
Running an SEO agency while also generating leads for it was a circular problem. SmarterOutbound's outsourced cold email gave me back the time to focus on client work.
- SEO agency founder spending 30% of week on lead generation instead of client work.
- Outsourcing outbound returned focus to actual SEO delivery.
- 6-9 new agency clients booked per quarter from outbound.
- Cost of the engagement is lower than the opportunity cost of founder time spent on lead gen.
I ran my SEO agency mostly on referrals for the first three years. As the business grew, referrals stopped covering growth — and I started spending most of my own week on lead gen instead of client work.
The math gets bad fast. I was billing $250/hour for client work and spending ~12 hours per week on cold outreach. That’s $3,000/week of opportunity cost on outbound that wasn’t even producing reliable results.
Why outsourcing worked
SmarterOutbound’s Foundation tier handles the entire cold email function for less than what one week of my own outreach time was costing me. The pipeline they generate now produces 6-9 new agency clients per quarter, which is more than I was producing on my own.
The bigger win is the time I got back. I’m doing SEO again instead of selling SEO.
Recommendation
If you run an agency and you’re the primary outbound operator, model what your hours are actually worth in client work. Outsourcing outbound is almost always cheaper than self-operating it once you cross a certain revenue threshold.
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