What I miss about running an Agency
And some things I don't
I know I’m generally down on running an agency. It’s kind of been my raison d’être to extol the virtues of spinning up a SaaS. But it wasn’t all bad. In fact, I look back on my time at my agency as one of the happiest of my career. Launching ScreenCloud was the best financial decision we made, but for me overall, I was happiest at my agency. So how would a former agency-owner and exited SaaS founder summarise his time at his agency? Could it give you some insight if you were on the same journey?
I’m writing from the very privileged position of hindsight here, where I know exactly how it ended. This sanitises some of the frustrations and fears. If only we could plug our decisions into a programme that would be able to calculate the exact outcome. But anyway, here goes….
The People
Agencies tend to attract nice people, don’t they? I mean, of course you get your assholes wherever you go in life, but my experience is that most people were decent, interesting and smart. There’s some natural selection here, since when you hire someone to your agency you are thinking about how they will come across to clients. Designers will need to be able to present their ideas to prospects and clients, account managers will need to be credible and resilient, even engineers might be called upon to pitch if the brief is particularly technical. You’re not going to pick someone who is capable but a dickhead.
The result is well-rounded, likeable people. And that made going to work and hanging out with them, well… nice. For me at least. When I think back on some of the characters we had, it’s with a lot of fondness.
The same can’t always be said for founders of course. They may appear insufferable to their employees. I guess, you’d have to speak to someone who worked for me to find the answer to that question.
Building Something on our Own Terms
My agency was the first company I started (along with my two cofounders). Before then, I’d worked for other people so maybe it was the novelty of starting our own thing that I loved so much. Somehow it didn’t feel as much on ‘our own terms’ when we started our SaaS: we had investors and the pressure to grow fast that comes with that and we also had much more of a playbook to follow, so it was sort of on our own terms, but sort of not. I guess in some ways, it was more ‘grown up’ and we had to be serious about what we were looking to achieve.
The agency, however, felt like we were free to chart whatever course we wanted, however crazy that might have seemed to others. I was younger then and the only thing that mattered was that we were able to pay ourselves and our staff and enjoy our time in the process. I certainly didn’t ever worry about growth trajectory. I was much more about creating a working environment that was fun and paid enough that we never regretted leaving employment, even if that meant not having a bigger house or an amazing holiday.
Fundamentally, making a living doing things exactly the way we wanted was liberating. I’m sure you know what I mean. We set the rules on when we worked, who we worked for, where we worked, what furniture we had, taking the team out for lunch or paying the bar bill… when we could afford it. We could put our own attitude into our marketing because our clients were buying ‘us’ not our product. We did some fun things with our own website. We even fired clients who we didn’t like working with.
Sat having a beer on a sunny Friday afternoon, after a solid week of building stuff on our own terms, in a London pub garden. It didn’t get much better than that.
The Wins
Winning work was brilliant. Firstly, because it secured our existence for a bit longer. But secondly because most work was an effort to win. Most Requests For a Proposal required an individual response. It required some unique creative. Maybe it required us to go in and pitch against others. And so, when we scored a victory it was a massive high. The kind of high you get when you’re in a team that wins a sporting competition.
With a SaaS company, especially when we were younger and we were mainly aimed at SMEs, we didn’t get to write proposals. We didn’t get to tailor anything: it’s the product we had (or planned to have soon) or nothing. In fact, doing bespoke work for individual clients on a product is something you want to avoid if you can.
With our SaaS, the wins were much more frequent but for much less money per customer. We quickly had thousands of customers and so we didn’t celebrate each one. Most customers we never spoke to. This changed when the business moved towards more of an enterprise offering and in fact felt like we were starting to come full circle again, just on a much larger and more professional scale.
The fully bespoke response to each lead at the agency, whilst hamstringing fast growth, was nevertheless a part of the job that I loved. Most of my significant memories of my time at the agency were around the big wins (and the great people, of course).
The Variety
We ended up working in a number of different sectors: children’s education, finance, aviation, insurance, FMCG, the arts, recruitment and publishing (and a load of others). Now, on balance that probably wasn’t the smartest move because we weren’t known for being the best in a particular vertical, but from a non-commercial perspective, it made life more interesting. We were constantly having to learn new things. It was challenging, but fun. I loved the fact that one day we’d be coming up with a game for under 5s for CBeebies and on another, building a graduate recruitment site for a bank.
Most opportunities became creative challenges: we were being asked to imagine something that the client hadn’t and it was a privilege in many ways as we were able to win work for some well-known brands.
The Peer Camaraderie
Agency owners are pretty sociable types. The three of us met at an agency and several of our former co-workers went on to start their own agencies, too. I became the Vice Chair of BIMA (The British Interactive Media Association), which was largely populated by agency founders. We met regularly and inevitably shared war stories. So, yes there was competition to a point (although there was a lot of work to be had back in the Naughties), but it was all good humoured.
Meeting other agency founders who were around the same age and at the same stage, was fantastic. We helped each other, we supported each other, we celebrated each others’ successes and we became friends for life. I’m currently sitting on the board of an agency with whom we shared an office between 2008 and 2012.
And of course some things I didn’t like…
I don’t really need to labour these things as I’ve written about why we decided to make the switch before. But for all the good things about running an agency, there were things that I know we have all felt that were less great.
Clients
Wouldn’t agency life be so much better if we didn’t have to deal with clients? Every so often, you would get a great client. One who knew what they were doing and respected what you did. But in more cases than not, clients didn’t have a clue what they wanted, ignored advice, quibbled over bills, moaned about stuff that wasn’t even our fault, refused to accept that building something from scratch may result in unforeseen bumps in the road etc etc.
Feast or Famine
Project-based work (as ours mostly was) was a constant treadmill of ‘win the work’, ‘do the work’, ‘get paid for the work’, ‘find more work to replace the work you just finished’. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes you had too much work and not enough people and other times you didn’t have enough to pay your monthly wage bill. It was stressful and pretty soul destroying at times.
Repetition
I talked about variety. But after a decade, even that variety becomes repetitive. There are only so many ways to build a website or an app. And, although you might pretend you do, you’re not really understanding the deeper strategy that sits behind a client’s product or Go To Market plan. This ‘surface level’ involvement in multiple business starts to feel… unchallenging.
Lack of Growth
I can only talk for myself here. But we grew quickly in the first few years and then plateaued. There are probably several reasons for this, now I have that gift of hindsight. But I still see this today with agencies I talk to. They just don’t grow. Or if they do, they grow by a few percent and chalk that up as a win. I heard someone this week boasting that they’d ‘not even had so much as an overdraft’ when asked if they’d ever sought external investment- the exact same flex that I used to use. But their growth was also flat. So, yeah well done for not raising money, but you’ve spent the last few years building zero extra equity value.
You don’t have to grow, of course. There’s no rule book that says growth is a requirement (unless you are venture-backed). But no growth for 5 years despite your best efforts, starts to feel like you’re surviving by treading water. And who wants to tread water for the rest of their career?
The Grass is Always Greener
In my case, the grass was, on balance, greener on the other side. But a different type of green. With hindsight I wouldn’t change that much. I’ve ended up in a place that I’d barely imagined was possible. If I could have got a glimpse into the future I would have reassured myself that the fun things I lost when we moved from agency to SaaS would be partly made up for by being able to ditch the negative things and then massively eclipsed by the challenge and rapid learning that came with scaling a SaaS. And, of course, the financial benefits, too.