Building an agency

Agency: Custom work, hourly or project pricing, scales with headcount. Productised service: Standard offer at a fixed price, e.g. "Webflow site in 14 days for $4,800." Consulting: Hourly advice, no delivery, scales with reputation.

Productised services are dramatically easier to sell, deliver, and scale than custom agency work. The reason most agencies stay agencies is that productising requires saying no to revenue — and that's psychologically hard.

Generic agencies compete on price. Positioned agencies compete on outcome.

The cheapest positioning move:

• Niche by industry: "Marketing agency for B2B SaaS" outperforms "Marketing agency."
• Niche by outcome: "We get B2B SaaS to $50k MRR" beats "We do marketing."
• Niche by ICP: "For founders who can't afford a CMO" beats "For ambitious companies."

The narrower the position, the higher the price you can charge. Always counter-intuitive; always true.

Most agency founders hire wrong. The order that works:

1. A delivery generalist — does the work you're currently doing, frees you to sell.
2. A project coordinator — keeps clients happy, manages timelines.
3. A second delivery generalist — capacity to take on the next 5 clients.

You don't need a sales hire until you're past $30k MRR. You don't need a "marketing manager" until you have 10+ employees. Generalists who deliver beat specialists who can't.

The agency-to-product transition:

1. Identify the repeatable 60%. What do you do for every client? That's your product.
2. Package it. Fixed scope, fixed timeline, fixed price.
3. Sell the package, not the hours. Resist customisation requests in year 1.
4. Train one person to deliver it without you. Test with a non-flagship client.

Most agencies that try this fail because the founder can't say no to custom requests. The discipline to stick with the package is the whole game.