What a Saturday of Pitch Prep and CRM Fixes Taught Me
A full Saturday on CRM invoicing, client scoping, cold outreach research and a 12 month plan. Honest notes on the dead ends and the work that stuck.
Saturday started at one minute past midnight and ended just after eight in the evening. In between I killed a dead brand, scoped two separate jobs for one client, researched a resort I have never spoken to, cleaned my pipeline down to the handful of names that actually matter, and then sat down and did the maths on what twelve more months of running a web agency in Nairobi needs to produce. It was not a shipping day. It was an admin and thinking day, and those are the ones nobody writes about.
Cleaning out dead projects before starting new ones
The first hour was deletion. I had a half-built thing sitting in my workspace that had quietly become void, so I told my assistant to treat all of it as permanently gone, not archived, not parked. Then I went through the rest of the folders and killed off the brands I am not using: a lifestyle idea, a redundant sub-brand, a group entity I set up once and never needed. Four names gone in about five minutes.
This matters more than it sounds. Every unused brand is a domain you half remember paying for, a logo folder you scroll past, a line in a document template that no longer applies. Carrying five identities when you can only sell one is not optionality, it is drag.
I also fixed a landing page problem I had been staring past for weeks. The call to action was a pill that looked bolted on, and the social proof was inconsistent (some entries had stars but no site, some had a site but no stars). The fix was not design. The fix was making the message so clear that the decision is easy. If someone has to work out what you want them to do, you have already lost.
Scoping a website rebuild and a CX system as two separate jobs
The biggest piece of real client work was for a retail client who wants a full reface of his website with complete functionality. I logged the work and cost to serve properly in my CRM, on the lead page, so the money side sits where I can see it rather than buried in an activity note.
Then he asked for something else: a customer experience system, like the one I run internally. And this is where I had to be disciplined, because the easy move is to bundle. I did not bundle. I logged it as a separate job with a separate price, because:
- The reface is a defined deliverable with an end date. The CX system is an ongoing capability.
- He explicitly said he wants no bloat. Only functionality. Bundling forces him to buy things he did not ask for.
- What he actually wants is autonomy, the ability to operate without me in the loop for everything. That is a different product from a pretty site.
- We have a special pricing agreement in place, below my standard monthly, and I wanted that visible rather than smuggled into a bigger number.
I started drafting three invoice options so he could pick the feature set he thinks he needs. Halfway through I looked at the chart and said out loud that it was hard to follow. So I stopped. I did not send it. If he asks, I will send it, and by then I will have had another day to make it readable. Sending a confusing pricing table is worse than sending nothing. A confused client does not choose the middle option, they choose to think about it later.
While I was in the CRM I cleaned up the document linking. I had an agreement reference that did not match what I had actually sent, which is the kind of small discrepancy that makes a client quietly trust you less. Found it, fixed it, cross-checked that nothing else was linked to the wrong record. I also wired the service agreement to the invoice, and I want to know when a client opens a document. Not to be creepy. Because "he has not replied" and "he has not opened it" are two completely different sales problems.
Researching prospects properly instead of blasting a template
Afternoon went to outreach, and I was harsher with my own pipeline than I have been before. I went through everything sitting in "new" and told my assistant to clean it out and leave only serious prospects. Most of them were no match. Small guesthouses and bed and breakfasts with no budget and no real decision maker. Keeping them in the list just makes the list look healthier than the business is.
The ones that survived got real work. For a boat tour operator I had been building concepts for, we moved away from "book on WhatsApp" as the only path and designed an on-platform booking flow plus a very simple admin page. Not a dashboard. A page where they can see who booked, what they want, and then text them personally. The point is not to remove the human touch, it is to give them control over their own time.
For a resort prospect, I had my assistant go to their live site in real time and break down every page: what each one has, what the scroll behaviour does, where the gaps are. Then we designed a visual concept for both mobile and web. First pass came back full of generic AI filler, so I had it stripped out. Generic work does not win a pitch against a resort that already has a working site. Specific observations do.
I also finally set up DDi properly on Facebook: username, WhatsApp button, a cover that has some personality instead of looking like a template, and a genuine study of what my ideal customers are already posting. Then I planned a two week low-budget animated campaign across Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, deliberately unfunded. If free distribution cannot prove the content works, paying to amplify it is just buying reach for something nobody wanted.
Running the actual numbers on a twelve month plan
Last thing at night I stopped working on clients and worked on myself. I audited my LinkedIn, built a banner, and then set an honest target: a twelve month timeline ending with the equipment I need, a proper home office, an assistant, and over five million shillings in turnover.
Context for how far that is. I currently live on an internship stipend of around seventeen and a half thousand shillings a month. So I ran the maths properly rather than picking a nice round number, and I made the timeline notes micro-specific instead of generic, because "grow revenue" is not a task. Then I put the whole thing in my CRM as trackable items. A plan that lives in a notes app is a wish.
What I would tell another founder
Delete the brands you are not using, and be ruthless about which leads stay in your pipeline, because a flattering list is worse than a short one. When a client asks for a second thing, price it as a second thing (bundling feels generous and it is actually how you end up underpaid for both). And if what you have drafted is hard to follow, do not send it. Nothing in your pipeline is so urgent that it is worth sending a confusing document.