FAQ
An agency coaching program helps agency owners fix positioning, lead generation and sales, and Tim Kilroy's starts at $399 a month.
Below are 45questions agency owners ask before choosing a coach, grouped by topic. Answers come from Tim Kilroy's published work and named sources. Start with the agency coaching program overview if you are new here.
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An agency coaching program is structured, ongoing advice for agency owners on the business side of running an agency: positioning, lead generation, sales, pricing, hiring and operations. Tim Kilroy's version, Agency Studio, is a weekly group clinic where founders bring live problems and leave with a number, a decision or a next action, rather than a workbook to finish later.
An agency coach helps an agency owner see which problem is really holding growth back and in what order to fix things. Tim Kilroy starts with diagnosis: reviewing numbers, pipeline, positioning, team and leadership, then pointing to the specific playbook needed that week. He reports coaching more than 300 agencies and over 25 years of agency and marketing experience.
Yes, because agencies have specific problems general coaches rarely see up close: founder-led sales, referral-dependent pipelines, generic positioning, retainer pricing and delivery capacity. Marketing agency business coaching from Tim Kilroy focuses on exactly those, drawing on three agency launches of his own (two exits and one crash) plus work with more than 300 agencies.
A coach helps you make better decisions and build the skill yourself, while a consultant typically builds or installs something for you. Tim Kilroy does both: Agency Studio is group coaching, while SalesOS and DemandOS are custom, done-with-you builds for agencies between $1M and $20M a year in revenue.
They overlap. A mentor usually shares personal experience informally, while a coach runs a structured process toward specific outcomes. Tim Kilroy combines both: he has launched three agencies, with two exits and one crash, and pairs that operator experience with a weekly coaching structure and written playbooks on positioning, sales and lead generation.
You probably benefit from one if growth has stalled despite working harder, referrals are slowing, every deal still needs you on the call, or deals keep collapsing to price. Those are the patterns Tim Kilroy sees most. If you're below about $20K a month, his own advice is to get reps and a clear offer first.
Tim Kilroy's Agency Studio group coaching is $399 a month, and Agency Studio+ is $999 a month, which adds a custom plan and a monthly one-on-one with Tim. Both are designed for founders under $50K a month. Custom work for agencies between $1M and $20M a year is scoped after a free call.
Agency Studio+ at $999 a month adds a custom plan and a monthly one-on-one with Tim Kilroy on top of the group setting. It is aimed at agencies between $25K and $50K a month, where every deal and delivery still runs through the founder and the next steps are first hires, a repeatable delivery process and a steadier pipeline.
For agencies past $1 million a year, Tim Kilroy's work moves to custom builds, SalesOS and DemandOS, which are scoped after a free WTF call rather than sold at a published price. His reasoning is that at this size the bottleneck is specific to your agency, so templated programs stop being the right tool.
Yes. The WTF call is a free 30-minute conversation. You describe what is going on in your agency, Tim Kilroy helps diagnose the real problem rather than the symptom, and you leave knowing what to fix first whether or not you work together. Use the contact page on timkilroy.com to start.
It can be, but treat headline ROI numbers carefully. The most cited executive coaching ROI figure, 788 percent, comes from a single Fortune 500 case study published in 2001, according to Leaders ADAPT. A better test is whether coaching moves a specific constraint, such as conversations, proposals or close rate, that you measure before and after.
Borrow the hiring math Tim Kilroy uses in Agency Studio: divide the monthly cost by your real profit margin to see the new revenue needed to cover it. At $399 a month and a 20% margin, that is about $2,000 a month in new revenue. Use your actual margin, calculated after paying yourself a salary.
In Agency Studio, founders meet every week and bring whatever is on fire. Tim Kilroy works the problem live on the call, such as opening a P&L, running the math on a hire, or rewriting an email that is not getting replies. You leave with a number, a decision or a next action, not homework.
Group coaching is better value when your problems are common to agencies your size and you learn from other founders; one-on-one fits when your situation is specific. Tim Kilroy offers both: Agency Studio is group, Agency Studio+ adds a monthly one-on-one, and agencies over $1M a year get fully custom work.
Typical examples from Agency Studio: opening your P&L to find real profit after paying yourself; dividing the cost of a hire by your margin to find the revenue you need first; stress-testing risks like one channel or one founder doing all the sales; and often, being told to do less. Each call ends with a concrete next action.
It varies by agency, and no timeline is guaranteed. Founders quoted on timkilroy.com describe changes over weeks to months; one founder reports going from 7 clients to 17 in 10 weeks. Treat those as individual reports, and measure your own progress against one constraint per quarter.
Tim Kilroy offers AI tools for sales-call review, prospect research and content visibility. Call Lab reviews a call transcript and gives coaching feedback, Call Lab Pro scores calls against methods such as SPIN, Challenger, MEDDIC and Sandler, and Discovery Lab researches a prospect in about 60 seconds. Some tools are free; current details are on timkilroy.com.
ChatGPT can help you think through questions, draft emails or review a transcript, but it does not know your numbers, market or team unless you tell it, and it will not hold you accountable. A common approach pairs human judgment with AI tools; Tim Kilroy, for example, uses AI for sales-call review and prospect research alongside live coaching.
Agency Studio is built around a weekly session where you bring live problems. Plan for the call itself plus the time to act on the decision you leave with. Confirm the current session length and schedule through the contact page at timkilroy.com before joining, since formats can change.
It is for established small marketing, creative, development, PR and content agencies that have outgrown referrals and need positioning, lead generation and a repeatable way to win clients. Agency Studio serves founders under $50K a month; SalesOS and DemandOS serve agencies between $1M and $20M in annual revenue.
Yes. Tim Kilroy lists PR agencies alongside marketing, creative, development and content agencies as the businesses he works with. The common thread is that the agency sits inside its clients' marketing and sales layer, so the same positioning, discovery and demand problems apply.
Yes. Digital marketing agency coaching is central to what Tim Kilroy does, and many testimonials on timkilroy.com come from performance marketing, ecommerce and growth agencies. The coaching covers the business side, meaning positioning, pipeline, sales process, pricing and team, rather than channel tactics like ad buying.
Usually not yet. Tim Kilroy's guidance is that below about $20K a month you need reps and a clear offer more than a coach. Agency Studio becomes useful around that point, when hustle stops being the issue and structure becomes the constraint.
That is the most common starting point. Tim Kilroy points out that referrals do not scale on demand: you cannot decide to get more of them this month. Coaching helps you add a system for attracting and qualifying good-fit clients, so growth no longer depends on whoever happens to recommend you.
No. Tim Kilroy's coaching is business coaching for agency owners, focused on positioning, pipeline, sales, pricing, cash and team. Founders often report less stress as those systems start working, and Tim writes openly about ADHD in entrepreneurship, but the work itself is commercial rather than life coaching.
The best coach depends on your bottleneck. Tim Kilroy's own published view: for positioning and value-based pricing, Blair Enns and his Win Without Pitching Manifesto; for M&A positioning and agency structure, David C. Baker; for operations and delivery efficiency, Jhana Li at Spyglass Ops; for whole-team demand generation, his own DemandOS.
Look for reviews that name a specific before and after, the agency type and the timeframe, and check whether the reviewer's agency resembles yours. Testimonials published by any coach, including those on timkilroy.com, are chosen by that coach, so treat them as individual reports and ask to speak with past clients.
A course teaches a fixed curriculum, while coaching applies judgment to your situation. Tim Kilroy's view is that agency problems are connected, so fixing one in isolation often creates the next fire. His free playbooks cover the frameworks; coaching helps decide which one you need right now.
There is no single best digital marketing agency; the right one understands your business, market and constraints. That is also Tim Kilroy's core advice to agencies. He cites that 70% of CMOs who fire an agency do so because they feel it does not understand their business, so choose for understanding, not tactics.
Not necessarily. ICF credentials show training in coaching methods, while agency coaches are usually chosen for operating experience. The experience Tim Kilroy reports is operational: over 25 years in agency and marketing work, three agency launches with two exits, and more than 300 agencies coached. Confirm any credential with the body that issued it.
Many do. The 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study estimates the profession generated $5.34 billion over the past year across 122,974 coach practitioners worldwide, and most coaches (59%) expect to make more money next year. Individual income varies widely by niche, experience and client base.
Because a salesperson can't run a process that only exists in the founder's head. Tim Kilroy's view is that most agencies have a missing-process problem, not a sales problem. Writing down a repeatable sales process first gives a first sales hire something real to run from day one.
Vertical positioning means focusing an agency on one industry or market so buyers know immediately who you're for. It buys faster trust and higher rates, but concentrates risk in one market. Tim Kilroy's guidance: choose a market you can genuinely dominate, then watch for over-concentration as closely as you would a client at 40% of revenue.
A discovery call is a structured conversation whose only job is to understand a prospect's problem well enough to decide whether a next step makes sense. Tim Kilroy is blunt that it is not a sales call: you are there to learn what is broken, how big it is, what they have tried and how they decide.
A prospect is qualified when you both agree out loud that there is a real problem, it is worth money, and they are the person who decides. In Tim Kilroy's five-stage funnel, a prospect only counts as qualified when you can name the problem in their own words, not when you have a good feeling.
Discovery is for understanding; the sales call comes after and presents the solution, approach and decision. Tim Kilroy argues that most agencies skip straight to selling, which produces generic proposals and ghosting. The only goal of discovery is getting to a next call with real mutual interest.
Usually because the call was a pitch with a question stapled to the end. If you leave without knowing what is broken, how big it is, what they have tried and how they decide, your proposal reads like every other agency's. Tim Kilroy calls the fix Return on Understanding.
Agency sales training teaches a team to run discovery, qualify, propose and follow up from a written process rather than founder instinct. Tim Kilroy's approach pulls the founder's selling know-how, which he calls Founder Magic, out of their head and into a process the team can run, supported by AI call review.
Tim Kilroy's follow-up playbook cites that 80% of sales require five or more follow-ups after the first meeting, while 44% of salespeople give up after one. Each follow-up should recap what the prospect said, tie your offer to their situation, and help them past the next point of friction.
Because the buyer cannot see the specific outcome you create, so the rate is the only thing left to compare. Tim Kilroy treats most price objections as positioning problems: shift the conversation to the outcome, raise the floor on who you take, and walk away from deals that anchor you low.
Start with the free 30-minute WTF call through the contact page on timkilroy.com. You talk through revenue, team, pipeline and operations, Tim helps name the real problem, and together you decide whether Agency Studio, Agency Studio+ or a custom build fits your stage, or whether you need none of them yet.
Start with your bottleneck, then check three things: whether the coach has run agencies like yours, whether their method starts with diagnosis rather than a fixed curriculum, and whether past clients describe specific results. Ask how they handle problems outside their specialty; Tim Kilroy, for example, publicly refers founders to other specialists.
Fix the constraint closest to revenue. Tim Kilroy's pipeline math works backwards from your goal: revenue divided by deal size gives deals needed, divided by close rate gives proposals, divided by proposal rate gives conversations. Pick the one weak stage (conversations, proposals or closes) and improve it this quarter.
It is the point where the founder is maxed out, so the agency can't grow, and the founder can't free up time because the agency can't afford help. Tim Kilroy's three ways out are a defined ideal client, scalable lead generation, and the right offer for that client, including the service and pricing model.
Then the free call should tell you that. Tim Kilroy's booking page says you leave knowing what to fix first whether or not you work together, and he publicly points founders to other specialists for problems like operations or M&A. Not every agency needs a coach right now.
Start with a free 30-minute WTF call with Tim Kilroy. No pitch. You leave knowing what to fix first, whether or not you work together.
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