UpWork - how to promote an agency?

Question

Upwork

Hey! It became interesting how people with experience decide for themselves the issue of promoting the agency.
Situation: a year of close work with UpWork, top rating, no negative reviews. I specialize in WordPress/WooCommerce, in which I solve a variety of issues from customization and removal of viruses to plugin development and integration of third-party APIs. It can be said that he is overwhelmed with work.
Along the way, smart colleagues began to appear, it became possible to hire people, and it was decided to try to advance as an agency.
But then we collapsed. A fairly simple pattern emerged:
1. Cover on behalf of the agency - almost complete disregard for our proposals;
2. Cover from the agency's account, but in the first person - the number of responses to proposals is increasing, but still low;
3. Cover from a freelancer's account - the probability of getting a response is much higher.
As a result, we hardly work on behalf of the agency, which, of course, is sad (we managed to collect good reviews there).
So far, I think that this is in the wrong niche for the agency, and I hope that after crawling into more serious things like Laravel and Meteor, things will go more fun. But it would be interesting to hear more different opinions on this.

Answer 1

Work directly if the volume is large, offer a job as a team and ask if the client wants to work with the agency, and you are already opening a new contract.
With an existing client, this is easy enough to do.