Playbook: small agency

An agency is many clients, each with their own voice and deliverables — exactly the shape askTheodor’s Companies were built for.

What you’ll do

• Model each client as its own Company.
• Staff a delivery team and keep client knowledge separate.
• Produce reports you can hand to stakeholders.

1. Start from the marketing-agency pack

Open Settings → Demos and install the marketing agency pack for a ready-made structure. Then make a Company per client — each one a separate neighborhood with its own brand voice, banned words, and goals, so one client’s rules never bleed into another’s.

2. Staff the delivery team

Hire the specialists each client needs from the catalog — Writers, Researchers, Creatives, Analysts — into that client’s Company. Put each client’s brand voice and house style in a Company-scope SOP so only that team sees it, and the work always sounds like them.

3. Produce and review deliverables

Workers prepare drafts; you sign off. Keep your Reviewers, Critics, and QA workers close (on your Command Center) so every artifact a delivery worker produces gets passed or failed before it reaches the client. Agents prepare, humans approve — that loop is your quality desk.

4. Report to stakeholders

When work goes out, anything outbound is drafted and held for your approval — never sent automatically — so a client email always passes a human first. For recurring reporting, set a routine (a weekly client report) per Company.

Scale the production floor

When deliverable volume grows, add a Team-Hub on a VPS to run Researchers and Writers 24/7, while final sends stay on your Command Center. The hub can never email a client on its own.

Keep clients walled off

Use Company scope, not Workspace scope, for anything client-specific. Workspace SOPs reach every client — reserve them for your own agency-wide policy.

Where the hours actually come back

Agency time disappears into work that isn’t billable and isn’t optional. Three places this setup recovers it:

Onboarding a new client. Instead of a week of absorbing their material, create the Company, load their brand guide, past campaigns and tone-of-voice notes into its Library, and write the Company-scope SOP. Your delivery workers now speak that client’s language from the first draft — and the setup itself is reusable as a checklist for the next client.

The status report nobody wants to write. A weekly Routine per Company: “Summarise what we produced for this client this week, what’s in progress, and what we’re waiting on from them — written as an update I could send as-is.” That last clause matters. You review and send rather than compose from nothing.

First drafts across every client at once. Ask Theodor for this week’s drafts across the portfolio and each client’s team produces in its own voice, because the voice lives in each Company. You’ve moved from writing to editing — which is both faster and the part where your judgement is actually worth billing.

Two things to get right before a client sees anything

First, Company scope, never Workspace scope for client material — a Workspace SOP reaches every client, and that’s the mistake that leaks one client’s positioning into another’s deck. Second, decide now what you’ll tell clients about AI-assisted work. Being straightforward about it early is far easier than being asked later.

Recap

A Company per client, a scoped delivery team, a human-approved review loop, and per-client reporting — that’s a small agency on askTheodor. Next, the same patterns aimed at a storefront.

📖 Reference in the docs: Companies · Company profile

➡️ Next: Playbook: e-commerce store