It’s difficult to scale an agency.

Often your billables are directly tied to your time. It can seem like the only way to scale is to hire, and take on more work, and this just increases your time demands. This can lead to a ‘client trap’ and problems with burnout, inability to exit, as well as the much prized passive income.

To overcome this issue, savvy agency owners are productizing & automating their offerings. But, newcomers often attempt this process much too early in the life of their business.

I worked on productizing at an agency for more than 5 years. In my experience, there’s a few things agency owners looking to pivot into this model tend to overlook. This especially applies to new owners trying to create ‘autopilot agencies’ right from the get-go.

REASON#1 – You Need Time To Iterate On Your Concept & Develop A Great Product.

When you are starting out, you don’t have enough data to know what the ‘ideal’ product for your clients would be.

You need to find a pattern, something that you can template and re-apply to other cases. This is the first step in automating a service offering, or even some internal process.

You need time to check which areas of your business, or your clients business, will benefit most from automation and focus your efforts there.

REASON#2 – Being Handmade Is Your Differentiator (at the Beginning…)

You need clients, and then you need to keep them. That’s job #1.

It’s cheaper to keep a customer than get a new one. For your own competitiveness & survivability as an agency, you must be customer service focused.

This is a differentiator between small boutique agencies and the big ones.

You won’t get very far with zero client-relationship management, or generic deliverables. You need to tailor your services to each clients unique needs and goals, as ‘unscalable’ as that may seem.

Do things that don’t scale at first, be different, be better, and win over your base of clients. This will also give you insight into a USP for your products down-the-line. Find a way to incorporate, or approach, the ‘unscalable’ tactics you built your base on.

REASON#3 – Prove Yourself First, & Then Get a Loyal Guinea Pig.

Once you’ve proven yourself to a client, you will have flexibility to try different strategies.

For example: It’s difficult to approach a client, without any earned trust, and say that you want full ownership of IP while you work together.

Many clients will see this as nontraditional, and some even as a red flag. But, this is more likely to be acceptable if you have made the client money (or look good to their boss) in the past, and you are trusted by the decision makers. I’ve seen public companies agree to these terms. It happens.

Build credibility with your clients first. Only after your client trusts your skills – can you use them to experiment your new products on. Think about this: Your clients will one day provide you with the initial set of testimonials for your product.