Agency

How it works

You take a service you can already deliver — advertising, design, development, content — and build a team to deliver it for more clients than you could serve alone. Your job changes from doing the work to selling it and making sure it gets done well. The upside is a business that can be sold; the cost is that you stop practising the craft you were good at.

How to start

1. 01

   Productise before you hire

   Turn the service into a defined package with a fixed scope, price and process. Bespoke work cannot be delegated reliably, which is why so many agencies stall at the founder's capacity.

2. 02

   Document the delivery process properly

   Write down exactly how the work gets done, step by step. Quality collapses when hiring outpaces documentation, and reputation is the whole business.

3. 03

   Hire delivery before you hire sales

   Founders should keep selling far longer than feels comfortable. Nobody sells your service as well as you do in the first two years.

4. 04

   Watch utilisation and margin per account

   Profit lives in the gap between what a client pays and what delivery costs. Agencies rarely fail on revenue; they fail on accounts that quietly lose money.

5. 05

   Concentrate on a niche to raise prices

   A generalist agency competes on price forever. One known for a specific outcome in a specific industry charges multiples for the same hours.

Honest trade-offs

Risks and failure modes

• Cash flow gaps between paying staff and being paid by clients, which is the most common cause of failure
• Losing a large client while carrying the team that served them
• Key staff leaving and taking client relationships with them
• Founder burnout from carrying sales, delivery oversight and management simultaneously

Common questions