How former freelancer Rebecca built all the ops at the agency Beam

Think you need years of agency or business experience to start an agency? You don’t. What you really need are valuable skills, clients, the willingness to learn, and the grit to persist through the inevitable hard times. 

That’s how Rebecca and Brooklin Nash started Beam. As successful freelance content marketers, they already had skills and clients. What they lacked was agency experience, so they committed to learning how to run one, even if it meant paying experts for guidance. 

Three years later, Beam is a 20-person team of full-time employees and long-term freelancers, working with clients like Outreach, Dooly, and SalesIQ.

We spoke with Rebecca, Beam’s Director of Operations, about what it took to build the agency and the systems that keep it running smoothly.

Building systems changed everything

Rebecca was in charge of operations from the start, even though, by her own admission, she had no idea what the role entailed. But she was ready to learn and reached out to different experts and consultants to ask how to set things up. 

One of the companies they spoke to was ZenPilot, an operations consultancy that helps agencies standardize their processes and set up ClickUp, a project management software. At the time, Beam was using Google Docs, Sheets, and folders to manage projects, but details kept slipping. They had trouble tracking what was said in client meetings, what needed to happen next, or even how clients were feeling about the work. 

They hired ZenPilot to restructure their operations in ClickUp, and this allowed them to centralize tasks, timelines, and meeting notes in one place and monitor whether team members completed their assigned work.

Now every client project starts with a template that includes time estimates, costs, and specific steps. Every task has a comment trail, so if something changes—or gets delayed—there’s a record of what happened and why. They maintain a catalog of internal systems and processes inside ClickUp to help with onboarding, planning, and documentation.

They also have systems for everything from employee onboarding to evaluating new leads, and Rebecca manages all these systems to ensure the team follows them consistently:

This structure gave Beam clarity into how projects were running, whether clients were happy, and if the agency was staying profitable. For instance, they once had cash flow issues, but team members were overworked, which didn’t make much sense. After checking ClickUp and reviewing tasks, timelines, and comment trails, she found the problem: They didn’t have a clear offboarding process. Projects were technically complete, but clients hadn’t approved final deliverables, so the team kept following up without billing extra.

With the new setup, if a deadline moved, it’d prompt the team to leave a comment explaining why. Rebecca could then spot the reason for delays and course-correct. Fixing that kind of gap was only possible because they had the right systems in place and because she was actively overseeing them. If she wasn’t, she wouldn’t have known of the problem.

“It’s not just about having clear systems,” Rebecca says. “It’s about having someone who maintains those systems and makes sure people use them well. If your team isn’t following good project management habits, the system doesn’t matter.”

Working with freelancers to scale without the overhead

Beam runs on a small core team and a larger network of freelancers. Outside of the co-founders, there are just three full-time employees. The rest of the team—writers, editors, designers—are contractors, many of whom have been with Beam for years.

This business model was intentional. Freelancers allowed Beam to scale up or down based on actual demand. Even though they started the business with their freelance clients, they had to let some go as their pricing and services changed, and they didn’t know how many clients they’d have or how much work they’d need to deliver each month. “You might pay more for freelancers,” Rebecca says, “but you’re paying for flexibility and avoiding underutilized staff. That mattered a lot in the beginning.”

How Beam scopes and prices projects

One of the most complex parts of running an agency—especially one built around freelancers—is figuring out how to price projects accurately and still ensure you’re profitable. 

Rebecca says it’s still a work in progress, but their approach has come a long way from where they started. In the early days, they were mostly guessing, either basing prices on what a client seemed willing to pay or slightly higher than what they would charge as freelancers. This caused them to underprice, which meant they couldn’t afford top-tier contractors and had to make do with lower-quality ones instead.

To address this, Rebecca paid and worked with Marcel Petitpas, the co-founder and CEO of Parakeeto, which is an agency operations consultancy that helps agencies price projects and track profitability. Together, they built custom templates and spreadsheets that Beam now uses to scope and evaluate every project.

Today, Beam uses the Parakeeto spreadsheet to scope projects based on:

• Estimated time to complete each task (based on their ClickUp templates).
• Internal costs, including salary, taxes, and benefits.
• Freelancer costs (treated as pass-through—what they’re paid is not part of Beam’s margin).
• Target profitability (e.g., 70% direct margin).

The sheet calculates both the break-even price and the ideal price if the project runs exactly as planned. If Beam decides to discount slightly—say, for a dream client or a well-known company—they can do so knowingly, with clear trade-offs in mind.

After scoping, the pricing details are used to draft the proposal, finalize the contract, and build out the workflow in ClickUp. Then each month, Rebecca compares the actual hours worked against the budgeted time. If they’re going over, they check the task history and comments to figure out what happened, like delays, scope creep, inefficiencies, and adjust from there.

Learn from others’ experiences to grow quickly

One of the biggest lessons from Beam’s story is that you don’t have to figure everything out on your own. In the early days, Beam spent thousands of dollars on business coaching, operations training, and frameworks from ZenPilot and Parakeeto. That investment helped them skip common mistakes and build better systems from the start.

If you can afford it, pay to learn from experts. But if not, start with free resources. Pilot, for example, has an entire founder series packed with real stories from agency leaders like Alex Birkett, Co-Founder of Omniscient Digital, on how they run and grow their business.