If you’re running (or thinking about starting) a Drupal agency, there are multi‑million‑dollar opportunities available right now but most agencies never see them. After 18 years running a Drupal agency, here's what Blake has learned about finding opportunities, pricing them, and winning them.

Pick Your Niche

The biggest mistake new agencies can make is trying to serve everyone. When you try to appeal to everyone, you can't speak to anyone with any real depth. You wouldn’t understand their compliance requirements, their industry terminology, or the problems that actually keep them up at night.

Choosing a niche changes everything because it gives you:

  • Instant credibility — you already understand their world
  • Faster sales cycles — you’re not learning on their dime
  • Clearer messaging — you can speak directly to their priorities
  • Better proposals — you know what they care about and what they ignore

Your niche usually comes from your background and once you've chosen your niche, make sure your positioning reflects that. 

Clients care about four things: a site that looks credible, loads fast, ranks on Google, and doesn't require a developer every time they need to make a change. Beyond the website itself, they want a partner who speaks plainly, stays accessible after launch, and picks up the phone. Lead with that and make sure your marketing uses the words your clients are actually searching. 

Land Clients Through RFPs

For Drupal agencies specifically, RFPs (Requests for Proposal) are the single best path to large contracts. These are publicly announced opportunities where an organization invites agencies to submit proposals for a project with serious budgets. $50K, $500K, sometimes into the millions, with the budget listed right there in the document.

Governments, nonprofits, universities, and large enterprises all use this process, and a huge portion of them already run on Drupal or are actively looking to migrate to it. That means your expertise is exactly what they're looking for.

The opportunities are everywhere — state-level contracts, local governments, international tenders in Canada and Ireland, and more. The problem most agencies run into isn't that the work doesn't exist. It's that they don't know where to look, how to filter the right ones, or how to respond effectively.

The most important mindset shift comes from the Shipley proposal management process: bid fewer, win more. Instead of sending out generic proposals to every RFP you can find, filter ruthlessly. Out of 100 opportunities, maybe 5 are actually a strong fit for your agency. Focus your energy there. A tailored, specific proposal built for the right opportunity will beat a generic one every single time.

Price the Work With Top-Down Estimating

One of the easiest things to overthink is pricing. Most people try to list every task and every hour before they can put a number on paper — that's bottom-up estimating, and it can completely stall you early in the process when you don't have all the details yet.

Instead, start with your team, not your tasks. This is called top-down estimating, and it gets you a credible number fast.

List the roles the project needs, like a project manager, business analyst, solutions architect, developers, QA engineer, UX designer. Assign each a capacity: full-time (40 hrs/week), half-time (20 hrs/week), or quarter-time (10 hrs/week). Then apply this formula:

Capacity × Duration × Hourly Rate = Estimated Cost

This gives you a credible rough estimate, which is exactly what clients want early in the process. It’s not your final price — it’s your “is this worth pursuing?” number. This method also helps you avoid underpricing large projects, which is one of the biggest risks for agencies moving into six‑figure work.

Build Repeatable Processes

Whether you're doing a full redesign, a Drupal 7 to 11 migration, or ongoing operations and maintenance, every project needs a clear process from day one.

That means documenting how you find and win clients, your sales-to-delivery handoff, your client onboarding process, and the actual build itself. If those aren't written down, every project is a different experience for the client and every new hire is just guessing how things work.

SOPs also directly help you win contracts. When a client sees that your results are repeatable and your process is structured, it reduces the risk of hiring you — and that matters when they're choosing between your proposal and five others.

As The E-Myth puts it: most small businesses fail because their founders love their craft but never build the systems that let the business run without them.

Want the full breakdown? This post covers the core framework, but the video goes much deeper — including real pricing walkthroughs, how to evaluate and respond to RFPs, and the specific processes built over 18 years of running a Drupal agency.