Why Agencies Struggle to Scale (and How to Fix It)
Key Takeaways
- The problem behind GuavaBox, DoInbound, and ZenPilot: processes trapped in the owner's head. You can't take a week off, and one strategist leaving derails the business.
- 950 agencies later, Andrew's conclusion was that the tool matters far less than the process you follow.
- Agency owners are a cook with six pots on the boil, watching the one that's spitting. The pot you aren't watching is your team.
- Growth, delivery, and operations are the three pillars. Many agencies have two working and can't scale because the third is out of whack.
- Decide who you help and what their costly pain is before you document anything. There are thousands of processes you could template; you need about 40 or 50.
- Processes need to live where work is done, with daily, weekly, and quarterly rhythms that bring the team back to them.
Episode 157 has no outside guest. Gray MacKenzie hosted with Andrew Dymski, his co-founder at GuavaBox and DoInbound, for part two of the DoInbound to ZenPilot rebrand story. Part one covered the internal journey. This one covers the outside view: the problem they’d watched agency owners hit over and over, why the software they built mattered less than they expected, and what the new ZenPilot program is.
Knowledge trapped in heads, and the owner as the bottleneck
Gray asked Andrew to start with the original problem, going back to their agency days at GuavaBox.
How do owners make the transition of having stuff trapped in their head, or even as a core team?… There’s an uncertainty there, because if you want to go on vacation for a week, you can’t, because you’re the bottleneck. If your head strategist takes a job at another agency and they get sniped, that’s a huge derailment for you.
Andrew’s picture of an agency without a system is a truck stuck in the mud: “the more you press the gas, the deeper the ruts you’re digging.” DoInbound was built to make the opposite happen, an agency that gets stronger with every client and team member added, and it taught them something they didn’t expect: “950 agencies later, we found out that the tool is not nearly as important as the process that you follow.” Gray added that nobody plans for a poached strategist until the agency is big enough to be worth poaching from. Every owner assumes they’re different. They aren’t.
Six pots on the boil, and the one you aren’t watching is your team
Andrew’s analogy for where an owner’s attention goes:
Agency owners are like a cook in a restaurant that has six pots on the boil at any given time, and they’re only paying attention to the one that is boiling so fast that the water’s kicking out, it’s landing on the burner, fires are sparking up. So you’ve got, as the owner, you think, oh, these other five pots, they’re fine. But what you don’t see is beneath that lid… that is your team. Your team, when they walk in, they’ve got a different mindset than you do as an owner.
Owners will take a sales call at 5:30 in the morning (Andrew had just done one with an agency owner in Australia) because they want the business to survive. Team members have different priorities, and that gap is where the risk lives.
You get to a point where you feel the strings start to tighten… What happens if that strategist does walk away? That keeps you up at night. That’s your business walking out the door. And that’s, I think, one of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned over these years, Gray, working with agencies, is that the people in the room, how they solve the client problems, that’s the business.
Sales, then delivery, then sales again
Gray asked how the best agencies get over the hump of scaling demand and delivery at the same time. Andrew said he used to think of them as two separate silos.
Your growth, your delivery, your operations, those are the three pillars of your agency. And some agencies have two of those things aligned really well. They’ve got delivery and operations down, the owner’s an implementer, they’ve got a tight checklist type process, beautiful design, their clients are super happy… but they can’t scale that because their growth section is way out of whack.
Gray described the pattern he sees in the agencies that do grow: stair steps, because you can only focus on one thing at a time. Push sales and grow revenue, then put sales on hold to catch up on delivery, then restart the sales process, then oversell and start losing clients. “The scaling piece is hard, and it’s just juggling back and forth between different pots.”
Who do you help, what’s their costly pain, and which 40 or 50 processes matter
What ties the three pillars together, Andrew said, is the vision on top. Nobody talks about it because everyone wants to talk tactics: LinkedIn outreach, nurture emails, Facebook ads.
It’s completely out of line if you think about that before you think about who are you trying to help, number one. What’s the costly pain that they have? What’s the outcome that they’re striving for? What’s the thing that keeps them up at night? Because when you’re talking to an owner, a potential client, they couldn’t give a rip about your Facebook ads. They couldn’t give a rip about your ebooks, your blog posts, how sweet HubSpot is. They don’t care. They want to grow.
Skipping that step is also where process documentation went wrong for DoInbound users.
They try to document processes for absolutely everything, and it goes one or two ways. One, they spend forever… and they never actually go to market with it. Or two, they get overwhelmed and they say, I needed to do this someday, but today I got to get this done… Tomorrow never freaking comes, because they missed that third piece, the specific scoped solution to the costly pain for the person you’re trying to help.
There are thousands of processes you could template, he said. You need about 40 or 50 to run a solid business. Gray owned the same mistake at GuavaBox: they documented most of their high-impact processes but not all of them, and the list still had entries like how to set up Google authorship on a client site, a 10-minute task done once per client that the client didn’t care about. Prioritize what you document.
The three-phase program, and processes that live where work is done
Gray asked Andrew to describe what ZenPilot was doing about this. Andrew’s starting point was that size doesn’t fix it: “you can be a five person agency and have this problem or you could be a 20-person agency and have this problem,” and some big names have kitchens you wouldn’t want to see.
The program (Gray had to remind him to name it: the Agency Accelerator) has three phases. First, unite the core team around who you help, their costly pain, and your offer. Second, processes, systems, and rhythms: prune the deliverable menu to one sheet of paper, template what remains, and run it inside a project management tool. Third, growth: a clear message, a shorter sales process, and a paid discovery project that puts the risk on the agency instead of the client (a student had just sold one for $12,000). Andrew’s warning on phase two:
Processes aren’t something you’re like, oh, I documented them, now I just slide them up on the shelf, check that box. No. Processes need to live where work is done, folks, and you need to bring the team back into these core rhythms every single day, every single week, every single quarter, twice a year, to keep the system running.
Andrew closed with the mission: help agency owners build a business they love, instead of looking back in 10 years at sacrificed family time and revenue on a business they don’t like. Gray’s filter for whether the program is for you: more revenue, better profit margin, happy clients, and a team that doesn’t hate each other. If you want something else, don’t bother.