On My Way To 7-Figs Building An Operations Management Agency

Heather Lawson-Bradfield

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Published: October 7th, 2023

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Heather Lawson-Bradfield

Founder, The Clover Collective

$50K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

The Clover Collec...

theclovercollective.com

from Tarpon Springs, FL, USA

started January 2018

$50,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

social media tool-icon

YouTube

Instagram

productivity

ClickUp

Slack

blog

Squarespace tool-icon

WordPress

crm

Dubsado

other

Zapier

Discover what books Heather recommends to grow your business!

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Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

Hello humans, my name is Heather Lawson-Bradfield. I am the imperfect founder of The The Clover Collective, a virtual ops management agency for creatives. I'm a corporate escapee turned six-figure entrepreneur currently managing 20 million in client portfolios.

We are an online operations management agency (obm agency) specializing in working with neurodivergent entrepreneurs and members of marginalized communities, women, and the queer community.

We support your people, processes, and tech and collectively work together to help the day-to-day. This can look like hiring, team management, SOPs, tech implementations/upgrades, reporting & analysis, workflow improvements, and other nerdtastic things that numb your brain.

Our current revenue is $500k for 2023 with a projected $1mm in 2024. We currently have 16 staff members with half at full time and half contractors. Our book of business is around 8-10 clients and we project to at least double this by mid 2024.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

The backstory: After 15 years in high-level leadership roles (call centers, data centers, international operations) in Fortune 5 companies, I hit burnout in 2015, and it took five years to recover.

I left corporate, launched my own business, and FIGURED it out. It was one of the most painful experiences, and I share all those lessons on The Imperfect Founder Podcast.

At the core of who I am, I love mentorship and helping other corporate escapees NOT TO freefall off the entrepreneurial cliff like I did. Now that The Clover Collective is thriving with a team of 30+ years of corporate experience, all “Robinhooding” their knowledge, it has freed me up to launch new projects.

I’ve been spending my time launching The Imperfect Founder podcast and building out new products THAT EXCITE me, like The Agency Blueprint (coming soon), helping other corporate escapees and entrepreneurs build a sustainable, successful, and ethical agency from scratch.

Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.

Building the agency model that thrives for us today took seven years of mistakes and straight-up failure. After leaving corporate, I underwent (and to this day still am undergoing) a corporate deconditioning process. I knew I needed to realign myself and my business goals and build something that corporations could never achieve: a human-centered environment.

As we do for our clients, we structured and built our agency around PEOPLE, PROCESSES, and TECH. We hire diverse, we hire young, and we focus on placing our employees in positions they are passionate about.

Our processes and tech stacks are then implemented to streamline and scale. We are constantly testing the latest tech tweaking processes for ourselves and clients, from lead gen and onboarding to offboarding and referrals. We've tried a lot of tools on the market.

Our tech stack is Dubsado, ClickUp (shifting to SmartSuitesoon), Slack, Canva, Zapier, Squarespace, WordPress, and Heartbeat. ChatGPT, Google Workspace. We use products in the market that already exist and then find ways to connect them to serve us. All in for tech, our cost is around 20-30k. We breakdown a full recommended list of our tech stack in this episode of The Imperfect Founder.

Business is what you make it, so make it a place where your team and clients can buy in and be proud of the ethos together.

Describe the process of launching the business.

I did what I call the "freefall off a cliff" style of launching. I just jumped. I didn't have a great strategy, go-to-market plan, or even a buyer persona. I just knew I had skills I'd developed, and they were needed out in the world.

So, bit by bit, year after year, I refined my offerings so that it was in the vein of what was needed in the small business world. It hurt the first three years. Even though I was turning good revenue, it was so sporadic and unpredictable that I ended up sitting in poverty spaces for months.

When the pandemic flattened the business I had started to build, I ended up taking work with a marketing agency. That ended in March of 2021, and I essentially decided to turn away from and down a high-paying job in corporate with a full suite of benefits (stock, PTO, health, 401k).

I felt in my gut that it wasn't the right path, and I went against the advice of multiple people who recommended I try to rebuild my business on the side. I knew I had to go all in, so I did.

I bootstrapped, painfully bootstrapped. I took in small accounts - $500/mo, $1k/mo retainers. My initial goal was to hit 3k a month in revenue. By October 2021, I hit my first 10k month. By April 2022, I hit my first 20k month. By December 2022, I hit my first 50k month. And now I'm on my way to 7 figs by next year.

After launching, clients came from networking and word of mouth. I went to conferences, and conventions, and did as much socializing as I could handle. Feedback has always been profound: the ways we understand the business and can make it make sense for clients in a way that is easy and seamless while anticipating the future state is second to none.

Try to think big picture and eliminate yourself as the bottleneck.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

Every business needs lead gen and revenue; that is a given. I try to help entrepreneurs understand that if you build a client experience and deliver excellence, you won’t hurt for money. Revenue will come.

Our primary source of new clients is referral-based now. Word-of-mouth marketing is by far THE BEST source. When your clients do your marketing for you, you know you are on to something. Now that we are at capacity with clients, we can branch out the budget into social media channels, podcasts, and PR.

This is me moving into a new space of mentorship that I didn’t have the capacity for before. Now I get to share the knowledge I’ve gained and help as many entrepreneurs (especially those escaping from corporate) as possible.

The strategy has our podcast, The Imperfect Founder, at the core by showcasing a live case study, mentoring entrepreneur and agency owner, Jupiter F Stone, as they scale their agency. From this podcast, we share our tips, methods, processes, freebies, and offerings like The Agency Bluprint. View this link as well.

Here is one example of a premier client of ours whom we pulled back from the brink of burnout and tripled her revenue in 9 months after implementing our agency model and restructuring her agency.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

Today is profitable. I’m hiring my operations manager so I can step out of the day-to-day and focus on programs like mentorship, scaling the podcast, and our newest product, The Agency Blueprint (coming shortly). So operations today are smoothing out even more. We have gone from having absolutely no digital presence to an engaged Instagram and LinkedIn audience that has been a great source of finding people and talent.

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Looking to the future, our short-term goal is to finish onboarding our own internal operations manager. Our long-term goal is to scale our impact through mentorship, our podcast, and helping solopreneurs thrive and scale in businesses that align with them in environments where every human can thrive.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

Oh, I have learned from so many mistakes and failures. I’ve had partnerships fall through, made poor hires, and, like many others, I was utterly blindsided by COVID-19 (where, over 24 hours, we lost every single client on the roster). I tried and failed, initially setting up a virtual assistant business, and I had to learn how to operate in a new world that was not corporate.

Luckily, I have humans around me that are a great support network. I slowly hired people with soft skills that I knew would be a great foundation and onboarded clients that we could set up for explosive growth and next-level case studies.

Yes, we still have nightmare clients, and no roster is perfect, but with each challenge, we learn how to pivot our processes, implement better tech stacks, and better support our people.

I’d say one of the challenges I come across daily is allowing too much access to me. I know this goes against the popular opinion of “no gatekeeping,” but I find that every conversation I have drains a lot of time and energy away from my enormous to-do list.

If I could advise a founder who is scaling, it would be to limit the amount of access people have to you so that the interactions you put your energy into can have even more impact. The same goes for your business. Try to think big picture and eliminate yourself as the bottleneck. How can you set up your team for success so they do not need to come to you for every decision/next step?

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

Let’s spill the tea on Clover’s ideal Tech Stack:

Project Management System - We are team ClickUp. It is a pivotal tool for both our agency and many of our clients for product management, both internally and externally.

CRM - We use Dubsado to manage discovery calls, lead gen forms, contracts, and invoices.

Communications (for both clients and team members) - Slack is the way to go here! Can’t live without it.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

When it comes to resources, I approach educating myself much like grazing. I nibble and move on and come back and nibble some more. I take pieces of information from a LOT of resources, practice them, see what sticks, and then move on when it doesn’t and try something new.

I’m very intrinsically motivated. So, I observe dozens of people and then pull out the patterns they all talk about and apply them in a way that makes sense to me. Hot on my radar right now is Tanner Campbell and his 1-year Podcast Mastermind.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

My go-to saying is, “Imperfect action is better than perfect inaction.” There is a point where you need to STOP consuming and start acting. Entrepreneurs often get stuck in a cycle of consuming multiple mentorships, courses, community groups, etc. I’m not saying those things are bad, but at some point, you need to DO THE THING!

You will fail. Not to be a negative Nancy, but that is just life. You will make mistakes, lose money, learn, pivot, and make money again. That is entrepreneurship. It is something new, not corporate, not set in stone, and oppressive or limiting. Business is what you make it, so make it a place where your team and clients can buy in and be proud of the ethos together.

Look forward to your next failure, embrace feeling uncomfortable, and don’t forget to take a moment to celebrate while you move on to the next big thing.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

We are always on the lookout for good talent. It's less about a specific position and more about skills. Are you curious? Do you know what questions to ask? Do you know how to think strategically?

But ultimately, we are expanding the ops agency and would like to work with ops experts who want to either grow or upskill. Less about experience and more about soft skills.