Owner draws from an LLC or sole proprietorship
If your agency is a sole proprietorship or an LLC taxed as one, paying yourself is mechanically trivial: transfer money from the business account to your personal account. That transfer is called an owner draw, and here is the part that reorients most new owners: the draw itself is not a taxable event, and it is not a business expense. You are taxed on the agency's profit for the year, all of it, whether you drew out every dollar or left it in the business. The draw just moves money you already own.
The practical discipline is to make draws regular and deliberate, a set amount on a set schedule, rather than pulling cash whenever the balance looks healthy. A steady draw forces the agency to prove its margin monthly, keeps client retainer float from masquerading as profit, and makes the second habit automatic: since no tax is withheld from a draw, a fixed slice of every draw (or of monthly profit) goes straight to a tax account to fund quarterly estimated payments.
Partners in a multi-member agency work similarly: draws against their share of profit, with each partner taxed on the full share reported on their Schedule K-1, drawn or not. Some partnerships add guaranteed payments, fixed amounts paid for work performed regardless of profit, which are taxable to the partner and deductible to the partnership.
W-2 payroll once the agency elects S corp
The S corporation election changes the mechanics completely. An owner who works in the business must be paid a reasonable salary through actual payroll: W-2, withholding, quarterly employment filings, the whole apparatus. Profit beyond the salary can then be taken as shareholder distributions, and those distributions avoid the 15.3% self-employment tax, which is the entire financial point of the election.
So an S corp agency owner's pay arrives in two streams: a salary that looks exactly like a paycheck anywhere, and periodic distributions of remaining profit. The salary must be defensible against market rates for the work; the distributions are where the tax efficiency lives. Getting the split wrong in either direction costs money, too much salary wastes payroll tax, too little invites the IRS to reclassify distributions.
Draws are not expenses, and the books must show it
The unifying rule across every structure: paying yourself is not a deduction (with the S corp salary as the exception, where it is a deduction to the company but taxable wages to you, a wash across the whole return). Owners who record draws as expenses understate profit and file wrong returns.
Keep one clean boundary and everything works: a business bank account that receives all retainers and pays all business costs, with owner pay leaving as clearly labeled draws or payroll. That single separation is what makes profit knowable, taxes plannable, and the eventual S corp conversation a spreadsheet exercise instead of a guess.