Running an agency is hard enough. Then they told us we didn't qualify.

If you own an agency, nobody has to explain the job. It's a human-capital business. Your people are expensive, your margins are thin, and most weeks you're not “building a brand.” You're plugging holes: utilization, scope creep, the tool that was supposed to save time and didn't, the hire you needed six months ago. You spend a lot of energy making the same hours produce a little more profit.

We know because we live it. Before My Tech Passport we spent years building software inside a service business: 400+ projects, 20+ AI products, platforms clients actually use every day. Same pressure as any shop: expensive talent, messy delivery, and a constant hunt for anything that puts money back in the company without adding another head.

SRED looked like that. A real profit center sitting in work we were already paying people to do. So we called the firms who file this stuff for a living.

The answer was instant, and it was the same every time: “Agencies and consultants don't qualify. SRED is for tech companies and manufacturers.” One consultant didn't even ask what we built. He looked at the business card and checked the no box.

That's how the industry works. “Market research and sales promotion” is on CRA's excluded-work list, so most firms hear “marketing agency” and stop. They never asked about the custom systems, the failed integrations, the months we burned because off-the-shelf tools couldn't do the job. They pattern-matched the label and moved on to the next call.

So we did what agency owners do when a vendor waves us off. We figured it out ourselves. We sat down with CRA's three tests (technological uncertainty, systematic investigation, technological advancement) and realized they'd put us in the wrong bucket. The client work might be marketing. The infrastructure behind it was engineering. Systems that broke under real load. Integrations that fought back. Architectures we threw out because they couldn't survive production. That work was on the page. They just never looked.

We filed. We got funded.

Then we looked around. Thousands of agencies and consultants in the same spot: building real technology inside a service business, sitting on five- and six-figure claims, being told no by people who never opened a repo. The average SRED firm makes money on volume. An owner who says “we do marketing” is a five-second disqualification, not a conversation.

My Tech Passport exists so you don't have to fight that alone. We speak both languages, agency operations and SRED technical narratives, because we run both. We'll tell you first what doesn't qualify, because nobody was honest with us. Then we find the work that does, and we build the claim around it.

Let this be another profit center. Not a science project. The credit for technical work you already paid people to do.