Which accounts we chase, how much we spend to win them, and how many meetings keep the pipeline full. Use the calculator for any single opportunity, and the tracker to see where the year stands.
Answer the six checks, enter the expected size and your honest odds. The verdict and the pitch budget update as you go.
Update the numbers each month, change the date, then press Save updated file. It downloads a fresh copy of this page with your latest figures already in it, so the next month you just open that file and edit again.
Ivalo competes on strategic creative value, not on price. Our new-business capacity is deliberately small, around 8 percent of total time across the agency, so every pitch competes with billable client work. Winning the wrong account, or over-investing to win the right one, costs us the same scarce hours.
Two anchors sit behind every number here. We target accounts, not one-off projects, worth roughly €100K a year, lasting about 3.5 years, delivered at a 30 percent total margin (revenue minus our own labour and any subcontracting).
Run the prospect against the six checks below. The first four are hard gates: fail any one of them and you decline, or escalate to Leena before spending pitch hours. The last two are Ivalo's existing qualifying questions.
| Check | What good looks like | Red flag |
|---|---|---|
| Account, not project | A realistic path to an ongoing relationship | A single deliverable with no continuation |
| Pays for value | Financially solid, buying strategic creative | Price-shopping, lowest-bid logic |
| ~€100K a year is plausible | Scope and ambition could reach €100K | Structurally small, capped well below |
| Environment is moving | New strategy, transformation, leadership shift | Static, business as usual |
| Premium fit | Client clearly values the added value | Sees our work as a commodity |
| Scarcity | Few agencies could deliver this | "Anyone" could do it |
Then place the opportunity in one of three tiers. Tier 1, pursue fully: passes every gate and is strong on premium fit and scarcity. Tier 2, pursue light: passes the gates but is mixed on value or scarcity, or sits below €100K, so keep it to meetings and a lightweight proposal with no heavy work sample. Decline: fails a hard gate, or it is a project rather than an account. A fast, gracious no protects capacity. Over 2023 to 2025 we declined around 57 percent of pitch invitations, and that selectivity is exactly why our win rate climbed from 18 percent to 50 percent.
Pitch investment is capped by what the account is worth, then discounted by how likely we are to win. A target account is worth €100K times 3.5 years times 30 percent margin, which is about €105K of lifetime margin. We cap total acquisition spend at roughly 12 percent of that, about €12.6K per won account, in line with our €12K to €15K CAC target. Because we win only some of what we pitch, a single pitch's budget is that figure multiplied by the odds of winning. It reduces to one rule.
At our €120 an hour own-cost rate, every 8 hours is about €1,000. The grid below is the same rule, pre-calculated. Cells show maximum pitch hours.
| Annual billing | 25% | 33% | 50% | 66% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| €50K | 13 | 17 | 26 | 35 |
| €100K | 26 | 35 | 53 | 69 |
| €200K | 53 | 69 | 105 | 139 |
| €300K | 79 | 105 | 158 | 208 |
Guardrails. Estimate win probability honestly and early, because a warm referral or inbound is not a cold RFP, and recalculate if the odds shift mid-process. Subcontracting counts against the same budget, since it erodes the same margin. If a pitch wants more hours than the ceiling allows, treat that as a signal to renegotiate the work-sample scope, partner with an established player, or walk away, rather than quietly overspend. On capacity: about 1,600 productive hours times 24 people times 8 percent is roughly 3,000 NB hours a year (about €370K), and we currently use around 1,800, so the discipline is spending on the right pitches, not spending less overall.
The target is six to eight new accounts a year, ideally one large anchor plus five to seven smaller accounts. Large accounts move rarely and carry onboarding and possible recruitment, so we plan for one a year and stay highly selective on it. The steady flow comes from the smaller ones.
Our 2023 to 2025 funnel, counted in companies, ran 69 met, 60 invited to pitch, 26 pitched, 13 won. That is about 5.3 first meetings per win, about 2.0 pitches per win, a 50 percent win rate once we pitch, and a deliberate choice to pitch only about 43 percent of invitations. Working backwards from about seven wins a year gives roughly 14 pitches, roughly 35 to 37 qualified first meetings, which lands at three to four qualified first meetings a month across the team, lighter over the summer.
| Metric | Target |
|---|---|
| Qualified first meetings | 3 to 4 a month, team-wide, lighter in summer |
| Formal pitches | About 14 a year, decline the rest |
| Win rate once we pitch | About 50 percent |
| New accounts won | 6 to 8 a year, ideally 1 large plus 5 to 7 smaller |
| New annual billing added | About €600 to 900K a year |
Meetings come from our own network, external bookers, and inbound from our marketing. We do not yet track win rate by channel, so start logging it, and we can lean into the warmest source.
Every number here flows from these inputs. Change one and the pitch-hour rule and the meeting targets move with it. Check with Leena if a case needs a different basis.