There are no scheduled client reporting calls, so we all have open calendars and can do actual work rather than talk about it.
The Client
Founded in 2019 by Jake Hundley and Cody See, Evergrow Marketing is a productized digital marketing agency for the landscaping and lawn care industry.
After years of working together at a big automotive agency in Iowa—low pay, 60-hour weeks, and a client meeting on the calendar every single day—Jake and Cody decided to build a fully remote agency with no client calls. Every client gets the same service package executed in 30-day sprints, and monthly reports are how progress and next steps are communicated.
Jake and Cody's rule is that their grandmas should be able to do their work, and that their tech stack should reflect that as well.
I want our marketing to be transactional, almost like paying your accountant. You pay us, we do the work you expect, you get an ROI, we’re all happy.
The Challenge
With reports carrying the client relationship, Jake needed a platform that could pull every client's data into one place and get it out the door without anyone touching it.
It had to run on a schedule without anyone remembering to hit send.
It had to connect to the local sources his clients get found on, like Google Business Profile and Yelp.
It had to run from a template, so signing a new client didn't cost hours.
It also had to be simple and reliable.
With no calls on the calendar, a broken report meant a client heard nothing at all that month.
Evergrow first handled reporting via RavenTools before switching to Google Data Studio (Looker Studio). However, Google caps GDS at 50 Google Ads connections. Evergrow needed more, so the team routed everything through a third-party vendor (PowerMyAnalytics) into a data warehouse and connected GDS to that instead. That left two points of failure instead of one, and no way to reconnect at the source.
Between 20% and 40% of reports broke in any given month, forcing Evergrow to spend as much as 12 hours a month on reporting. Fixing a single report meant filing a ticket with PowerMyAnalytics, waiting, then pulling in whoever knew Google Data Studio’s setup well enough to help, all before a single executive summary went out.
If our business model is speed, accuracy, and reliability, we need a tool that can accomplish that.
The Solution
Jake had avoided AgencyAnalytics for years, assuming that a tool used by so many agencies was gimmicky. He tried it only after he had grown tired of maintaining his own reporting setup.
Migration took just a couple of days without any help from the onboarding team. He built one templated report, duplicated it across 20 clients, and connected the sources.
Reports are now sent on a schedule every third of the month with no manual work. The team's remaining task is to highlight what the numbers show, which takes about 5 to 10 minutes per client. When a connection drops, anyone on the team can reconnect it at the source.
Some of Evergrow's clients are franchises, so their head office needs to see every location's report, while each franchisee should only see their own. With AgencyAnalytics, Evergrow groups reports into folders, and account access determines who can open each one. Client access has become an upsell opportunity for the agency, providing clients with live reports on top of their monthly snapshot.
It’s one less thing to worry about from a technical perspective. The integrations we need are there. The templates and automations are exactly what we need.
The Result
Evergrow has grown from roughly 20 clients to 35, and reporting hasn't gotten any harder along the way. Signing a new client no longer adds hours of reporting work, which is what lets a lean team of five keep taking on more.
Clients get their reports at the same time every month, with numbers that match what they'd find in the native platforms.
With the time Evergrow gets back, Jake focuses on researching and developing upsells that raise revenue per client without adding to anyone's workload. The agency also focuses on improving its core service without charging more. For Evergrow, a productized service that costs less than a custom one and outperforms it is a recipe for client retention.
As a productized agency, every administrative minute spent managing or fixing reporting is valuable time. AgencyAnalytics removes that burden and streamlines our reporting process better than any other tool out there.
