Written inside an agency before it was sold to one.
Gydon began as the CRM for our own agency, so the retainer that never quite covers the work, the website build stalled waiting on client content, and the quick favour that turns into three hours are problems it was built against rather than features somebody imagined.
From enquiry to signed retainer on one record
Leads and a deal pipeline with your own stages, so a proposal sitting unanswered for three weeks is visible rather than remembered. The proposal is a quote on your own template, and when it is accepted it becomes the work instead of being retyped into a separate project tool.
Companies House lookup fills in and checks the firmographics, and duplicate detection stops the same prospect existing three times because three people found them.
- Pipeline stages you define, with values and expected close dates
- Proposals as quotes, with merge fields into the live record
- Every email, call and document against the account, whoever handled it
- Segments and engagement scoring, for the list you keep meaning to work
The pipeline, with the proposals still open on it.
Builds, retainers and favours are all work
A website build wants a plan with phases and sign-off. A monthly SEO or PPC retainer wants the same handful of tasks every month. A request that arrives at four on a Friday wants somebody to own it. Gydon holds all three as tasks against the account, so none of it lives only in an inbox.
Templates save the most time here, because a build has roughly the same shape every time. Applying one creates its tasks rather than somebody rebuilding the plan from memory.
- Templates per kind of engagement, applied to a new client in one action
- Portfolio view across every live project, with owner and progress
- Tickets with service levels, for the requests that are not projects
- Mail threaded onto the account, so a handover is not an inbox export
Builds and retainers side by side, with who owns each.
Which retainers are actually worth having
Everybody carries a cost rate and a billable rate, and time goes against the thing it belongs to: a project, a ticket, a task, a client. So the question agencies avoid asking, whether a £900 a month retainer is costing £1,200 in unbilled help, has an answer with a date range on it.
Workload shows the week ahead per person against their capacity, so somebody being promised more hours than exist is visible before they find out for themselves on Wednesday.
- A running clock or time entered afterwards, whichever suits the work
- Billable and non-billable split, per client and per person
- Scope creep visible as hours booked rather than absorbed and forgotten
- Reporting across time, projects, tickets and invoices in one query
Committed hours per person, before the week goes wrong.
The monthly report that sends itself
The report builder works over live records rather than an export. Build the question once, save it, and have it delivered on a schedule, which is how the first Monday of the month stops being somebody's whole morning.
Where you run client marketing yourselves, bulk email and two-way SMS are in the same system, with consent and unsubscribe state held on the contact record. That is where they have to be if you are going to answer a question about them later, and it is what PECR expects.
Saved questions, delivered on a schedule.
What agencies usually switch on
- Project management
- Projects, portfolio planning, team capacity and templates for the engagements that repeat.
- Support and ticketing
- Client requests on the account, with service levels, canned responses and a knowledge base.
- Email campaigns and SMS
- Campaigns for clients or for yourselves, with consent state held on the contact.
- Domains and hosting
- If you host what you build, that is its own set of modules. See Web Hosts.
- Xero and Stripe
- Recurring invoices with payment links on them, synced to the accounts package.
- Always included
- CRM, quotes and invoices, tasks, calendar, timesheets, reporting, document templates, workflows and permissions.
- What Gydon is not
- It is not an SEO or PPC tool. No rank tracking, no keyword research, no ad account integration and no analytics dashboards. Your Semrush, Google Ads and GA4 stay where they are; Gydon runs the business around them.
Bring the client you are not sure about
The retainer that never quite covers the work. We will show you where the hours would land and what the month actually looked like.