Published 18 Feb 2026  ·  Depesh Vyas

From 0 Systems to $120K MRR: How a Marketing Agency Built Operations That Scaled

When I joined this B2B marketing agency as second-in-command to the co-founder, the business was at $15K MRR and had been there for a while. Revenue wasn't the problem. The founder was good at sales, knew the market, and had built something with real potential.

The problem was that nothing else existed. There were no documented processes. No standard way to onboard a client. No framework for how prospects got audited. No meeting structure. No KPIs. No delivery standards. No accountability system. Team calls and client calls had no consistent format. Culture was whatever the founder embodied on any given day.

Everything — and I mean everything — ran through the founder. He was the sales person, the account manager, the quality reviewer, the people manager, the strategist, and the crisis handler. The business had 8x growth potential sitting in front of it, and zero operational infrastructure to capture it.

This is what we built, and what happened.

Month 1: Taking Over Operations Completely

The first and most important thing that happened wasn't building a system — it was a clear handoff of operational ownership. The founder moved into a single lane: sales. My lane was everything else.

This sounds simple. It's not. Founders who have run every function personally find it genuinely difficult to let go of operational decision-making, even when they intellectually want to. The first month is as much about establishing the new authority structure as it is about building anything.

Once that was clear, the first things built were the foundations that everything else sits on: a prospect auditing framework (so every sales conversation produced consistent, structured information), a basic client onboarding process, and a first version of the team communication structure. Not perfect — good enough to stop the chaos.

The Prospect Audit Framework

Before I joined, every sales conversation was different. The founder ran them on feel, which worked when he was doing all the selling, but produced wildly inconsistent information. When a prospect converted to a client, the onboarding team had no standardised picture of what had been promised, what the client's actual situation was, or what success looked like for them.

The prospect audit framework changed this. Every qualified prospect went through the same structured discovery process before a proposal was sent. The output was a consistent intake document that covered business context, current operations, key pain points, goals, and the specific constraints that would shape the engagement. That document became the handoff from sales to delivery — which meant delivery started every engagement with a clear, standardised picture of the client rather than trying to reconstruct it from memory.

This single change reduced onboarding friction significantly and started closing the gap between what was sold and what was delivered.

Building the Team Structure and Communication Cadence

With no meeting structure in place, communication was entirely ad hoc. The founder was being messaged throughout the day with questions, updates, approvals, and escalations. Team members didn't know what their peers were working on. There was no regular moment where the whole team aligned on priorities.

The structure we built was straightforward: a daily 20-minute standup (each person: what I completed, what I'm doing today, blockers for my manager only), a Monday planning session to assign the week's work with clear ownership and hour estimates, and a Friday retrospective where the team reviewed against what was planned.

The immediate effect was that ad-hoc interruptions dropped substantially. Questions that could wait for standup waited for standup. The founder was no longer the answer to every "quick question" because there was now a structured forum for those questions to be handled. Within two weeks, the founder's involvement in daily operational communication had dropped from constant to occasional.

Client Call Structure

Client calls had no standard format. Different team members ran them differently. There was no consistent agenda, no clear outcomes expected, no standard for what got documented afterward. Clients had variable experiences depending on who they spoke to and what day it was.

We built a standard client call framework: a pre-call prep checklist, a consistent agenda structure, defined outcomes expected from each call type (onboarding, monthly review, quarterly strategic), and a post-call documentation format that fed into the project management system. Every client interaction followed the same shape, regardless of who ran it.

The effect on client experience was measurable. Satisfaction with communication improved. Escalations that were previously common — clients frustrated that nothing was being followed up, that they'd had to say the same thing twice — became rare.

Team Culture and Accountability

Culture in a founder-led business without operational structure is typically: "work hard, figure it out, ask the founder when you're stuck." This produces variable effort, inconsistent standards, and a team that's dependent on the founder for direction rather than capable of generating it themselves.

What we built instead was a culture around ownership and measurement. Clear role definitions with specific outcomes each person was accountable for. KPIs that were reviewed weekly — not as a management tool, but as a shared picture of how the business was performing. A peer review system for deliverables that gave team members accountability for quality, rather than routing everything to the founder.

The team began to function with genuine independence. Problems got solved at the appropriate level. Quality improved because there was now a standard to measure against. New team members onboarded faster because expectations were documented rather than learned through osmosis.

The Result Over 10 Months

The agency went from $15K MRR to $120K MRR in 10 months. The founder's involvement in operations went from constant — he was previously involved in every aspect of the business — to almost exclusively sales-focused. The team grew and scaled without requiring proportionally more founder attention.

The growth wasn't driven by a new product, a breakthrough marketing campaign, or a lucky referral. It was driven by the fact that the founder finally had the time and headspace to focus entirely on sales — because operations were no longer his problem to manage.

That's the lever most founders at this stage underestimate. Not more leads. More founder capacity for the things only the founder can do.

What This Looks Like for Your Business

The specific systems built here — the prospect audit framework, the communication cadence, the client call structure, the accountability framework — were designed for this agency's specific situation. Your business will have different constraints and therefore different priorities.

What's consistent across every engagement is the sequence: first, get a clear picture of what's actually broken; second, build the highest-leverage fixes first; third, establish the operating cadence that makes everything else repeatable; fourth, remove the founder from day-to-day execution systematically rather than all at once.

The starting point is always the diagnostic. You can't build the right operational infrastructure without first understanding exactly what's constraining the business. That's what the Operations Audit is designed to produce.

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Depesh Vyas is the founder of VBOG (Vyas Business Operations Group). He works with service business founders at $10K–$40K MRR who are stuck in execution. The $500 Operations Audit is the starting point: a 7-day diagnostic that tells you exactly what's constraining your growth and what to build first.