Episode 70: The Agency That Grew Revenue Without Adding Clients (Copy)

May 8

"We focus 99.9% of our energies on doing the work for our clients. We spend literally zero time on biz dev -- and our revenue has grown quite a bit this year through upselling alone."

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TL;DR — Key Takeaways

Dev shop owners get stuck on the "agency treadmill" because they stay in the developer role too long. The shift to sales is what breaks the ceiling.
The best technical founders can become exceptional salespeople -- selling services is really just explaining a credible future state to someone who needs confidence before they sign.
Giving away architecture and strategy advice for free during the sales process builds more trust than any paid discovery engagement. By the time the numbers come up, resistance disappears.
The metrics that matter are forward-looking: forecasted resource utilization, projected project margins, and how many days of runway you have before you need another sale.
Resource utilization is the single most actionable operational number for a dev shop. Know your break-even percentage and track it weekly going forward -- not backward.
The "bench buffer" tactic: offer slower-growth clients a discounted rate with no fixed timeline, letting you fill gaps with pre-sold work rather than scrambling for new projects.
AI tools like Claude Code can add 30% productivity on good days -- and 0% on bad ones. The execution still matters. What changes is volume: a 10-person shop can now take on 4-5 projects instead of 2-3.

Does This Sound Familiar?

You started as the best developer in the room. That's how you won clients early on, and how you kept them. But somewhere along the way, being the best developer stopped being the thing your business actually needed from you.

The treadmill kicks in. Big project lands, cash is good. Project wraps, pipeline is thin. Repeat. You're doing great work and staying exactly in the same place -- because the constraint was never the quality of your code. It was the top of the funnel, and you were too buried in delivery to see it.

The other thing nobody warns you about: all those tools you stitched together -- Harvest, HubSpot, QuickBooks, spreadsheets -- they work fine in isolation. The damage happens in the gaps between them. Wrong invoice timing, misaligned expectations, a client who thought you'd be further along by now. Each one a small fire, each one stealing time you don't have.

If you're running a 10-30 person dev shop and that's landing a little close to home, this episode is worth your time.

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Meet the Guest

Joe Conway is the CEO of Treya, an operations platform built specifically for dev shops. Before Treya, he grew a software development agency to $24 million in revenue and sold it -- then spent two years not building anything before AI pulled him back in. He's now applying everything he learned the hard way to a product designed to give small agencies the financial visibility that only bigger shops can usually afford.

Visit heytreya.com →

Episod e Summary

1. The moment worth building something new

After selling his agency and taking two years to decompress -- skydiving, MMA, all of it -- Joe wasn't planning to start another company. Then AI tools started arriving, and he approached them the way he approached everything: build a small project, see what happens.

He started with a pricing calculator for software projects, something he'd always done in spreadsheets. Using Claude to handle the parts he didn't want to code himself, he rediscovered the fun in programming. Then his mind went back to the real operational headaches of running a dev shop: the gaps between Harvest and HubSpot and QuickBooks, the invoicing errors, the financial forecasting that was always a beat too late to be useful.

He started reaching out to other dev shop owners on LinkedIn as he built. "The best barometer of whether you're building something interesting," Joe said, "is if people have suggestions for it." They did. He kept going.

2. The identity shift: from best developer to best salesperson

Joe admits the transition took longer than it should have. For the first few years, he kept his head down on the technical work -- and the business reflected it. Feast-or-famine project cycles, no real control over the pipeline, a ceiling that came down to how many hours were in a year.

The turning point was realizing he wasn't adding unique value as a developer anymore. His team had people who were better than him. The place he could make the most impact was sales -- which turned out to be the hardest professional shift he'd made.

What helped him make the leap was reframing sales as an engineering problem. "How do you turn your sales pipeline into a number you can measure and fiddle with?" Once he could think about it that way, the analysis paralysis started to lift.

3. The counterintuitive sales lesson from an 18-month deal

The single biggest sales education of Joe's career came from a deal that took a year and a half to close. A prospect told him they didn't need him -- they had IBM. He kept in touch anyway. Nine months later, they called back.

What followed was an extended process of diagnosing their real problem (the existing platform was essentially unsalvageable), interviewing five different business units, and building an architecture plan and roadmap -- all before a dollar changed hands. Joe became an internal champion, walking the halls selling the future vision to executives.

By the time numbers came up, nobody pushed back. It was 2x the largest deal they'd closed.

The lesson he took from it changed how his team approached every sales process after that. Paid discovery -- the $15K to $30K "we'll figure out what it costs to build what you want" model -- wasn't getting traction. Giving the strategic work away for free, and letting the trust compound, worked.

"We used to come at it from the approach of let's sell discovery. A lot of people were hesitant to spend this money when they had a limited budget on just telling you how much it costs to build the thing they want built in the first place."

4. What Treya actually solves

The problem Treya addresses isn't dramatic. It's the slow bleed of small things falling through the cracks: a client who didn't expect an invoice, a team member sitting on the bench for two weeks before anyone noticed, a project margin that looked fine in theory and leaked in practice.

Larger agencies hire people to manage this. A 200-person shop has a CFO, a finance team, dedicated ops staff. A 10-person shop has everyone wearing five hats, and administrative overhead is a direct cost with no billing counterpart.

Treya's goal is to give smaller dev shops the same financial visibility without the headcount. Joe is clear about the fit: if you're a 10-30 person shop that's still growing, this is the tool. If you're already running Oracle or Dynamics, you've outgrown it.

5. The numbers that actually matter

When asked what single metric he'd surface for agency owners who aren't tracking it, Joe gave three that form a coherent picture: cash in the bank, accounts receivable, and booked business. Compare that combined figure to your burn rate, and you know how many days you have before you need another sale.

From there, resource utilization is the most actionable operational number. If 8 out of 10 people are on billable work, that's 80% utilization. Every dev shop has a break-even percentage -- maybe it's 67%, maybe it's 70% -- and the goal is to know that number and track it weekly, looking forward.

The key distinction Joe kept coming back to: backward metrics are for accountants and the IRS. Forward metrics are the only ones you can do something about. "You can't resell an hour. If someone on your team isn't working this week, that hour's gone forever."

6. The bench buffer tactic

One tactical idea Joe shared for smoothing over pipeline gaps: offer clients who can't keep pace with your rate growth a discounted retainer with no fixed timeline. They sign an agreement, you commit to getting their work done within the year, and you slot it in whenever you have bench capacity.

It keeps those relationships alive without sacrificing margins on active projects. And it gives you a buffer to pull from during slow stretches rather than scrambling for new business at the worst possible time.

Notable Quotes

"The best CEOs just have 5 really good stories they tell every day."
"The future's the only thing that matters in this business. Going backwards is just -- I don't care."
"I don't care about your net profit margin last year. I care about your forecasted profit margin on this project, because you can do something about that."
"A services company -- you can just one day turn the light on and get a project and you're profitable. Within the first week of starting my company, we closed a deal and we were automatically profitable."