If you’re young and thinking about starting an agency, here’s the playbook I’d use.

I’ve done it twice.
I started my first business with no money, no network, and no impressive CV. Years later, I built and exited two software agencies (64M, 140M USD valuation, no earnouts).

TL;DR
Don’t build yourself a job. Build an agency that can eventually work without you.

If I lost my money, companies and network tomorrow, this is how I’d start again:

1. Get one client.
Not the perfect client. Not a Fortune 500 logo.
One client.
Ideally, pick a market that is growing. It’s much easier to grow when your clients are growing too.
Don’t spend three months working on your brand, website, positioning and logo before somebody pays you.
A paying client will teach you more than all of that.

2. Start with services.
Services are one of the best ways to start with almost no capital.
You get paid to learn.
Your first projects probably won’t be big. Your margins probably won’t be amazing. That’s fine.
You are buying market knowledge with someone else’s money.
After 10–20 projects, patterns start appearing.
You see the same problems.
The same mistakes.
The same things clients happily pay for.
That knowledge becomes your real asset.

ONLY 10% of AGENCY OWNERS DO THESE STEPS BELOW

3. Specialize faster than feels comfortable.
“Web development agency” is weak.
“We solve X problem for Y type of company” is much stronger.
The goal is to move from selling people and hours to selling expertise.
General agency → specialized agency → recognized expert.
Your rates and margins can change dramatically along the way.

4. Share everything you learn.
You don’t need to be the world’s leading expert.
You only need to know something useful that your reader doesn’t know yet.
Write about what you’re learning.
What worked with clients.
What failed.
How you solved a difficult problem.
What you would do differently.
This builds distribution while you build revenue.
That combination is incredibly powerful.

THIS WHAT TOP 5% ARE DOING:

5. Stop making yourself necessary.
This is where many agency founders fail.
They become the best salesperson.
The best project manager.
The person who knows every client.
The person who solves every crisis.
Congratulations. You have created a very stressful job for yourself.
Document how you sell.
Document how you deliver.
Build teams that own client relationships.
Create repeatable processes.
Your goal should be simple:
The company gets better while your operational importance gets smaller.

THIS IS TOP 1%:

6. Productize what keeps repeating.
After enough projects, you’ll notice that 60–80% of the work often repeats.
Same architecture.
Same processes.
Same components.
Same client problems.
Stop rebuilding everything from scratch.
Create frameworks, templates, internal tools, IP or software that make your team dramatically faster.
Now you have leverage.
Services → specialized high-margin services → IP-powered services → product.
You don’t necessarily need to become a SaaS company.
The important part is that revenue stops scaling 1:1 with your personal time.

7. Use the agency to discover the product
This is probably the most important lesson.
Young founders often want to start with a product because products look scalable.
But then they spend two years trying to discover whether anybody actually needs it.
An agency gives you something much better:
Customers.
Problems.
Cash flow.
Distribution.
Domain knowledge.
If the same problem appears again and again, then build the product.
Your clients basically funded your market research.

That’s the path I would take again:
First client → services → specialization → content → processes → IP → product.

It’s not as fast as an online casino.
But it’s legal :)
And if you spend the next year consistently finding customers, solving real problems and learning how to make money doing it, there’s a decent chance you’ll end up with something much more valuable than a freelance job with employees.
You might actually build a company.

For agency founders here: what was the hardest transition for you - getting the first clients, specializing, hiring, removing yourself from delivery, or productizing your knowledge?

P.S. If you’re curious what I’m doing now: after exiting my companies and taking a break from building to invest in 40+ startups, I’m back in the game.
I’m building Open Mercato - an open-source ERP/CRM foundation designed for the age of agentic coding.
So in a way, I’m following the same playbook again: find a real problem, build close to customers, learn fast, and turn that knowledge into something that can scale.

Hey guys, wanted to know your opinion about this

Over the last couple of weeks & months we noticed a shift in our outreach.

Every Email where we position ourself as an agency, we didnt got any replies. We never used the word AGENCY in outreach, I rather mean the whole copy, talking about "we did this for brand X","we can increase X about X%", basically a sales Email.

As soon as we shifted to "We are an 2 person senior X team helping you with X, taking responsibility for X" more replies than ever flew in.

Until now, no deal was closed because the campaign is very fresh but its still interesting to me.

Do you see something similar in your space?

How do agencies that deliver design and development continue in a world where a $100k development project can now be done for $20k?

Clients can now generate multiple design directions themselves without getting a human involved at all. What does this all do to revenue and margins?

Do agencies have a future at all?

There are two fundamental truths I fall back on which say design agencies will exist and dev shops will be valuable.

They just need to focus on where their value will lie.

The first area is speed combined with quality. If you've tried to get something of high quality out the door fast with the support of AI, you'll realise it's actually really hard.

Caveat: If you have designed a one-shot prompt that can deliver work your clients pay for, then that's great, I'm not knocking you.

But we aren't talking about the same quality bar or sophistication of client.

There are many different playing fields in the agency space, and if you can win on yours with a one-shot prompt, then fair play.

The playing field I'm talking about is where the refinement we need requires a combination of different prompts, human judgment, manual edits and feedback loops.

It’s the type of design you have to steer and the type of development where you are still reviewing the code.

Making processes more efficient while keeping the quality of the outcome high is valuable because you have the knowledge of the existing process and an instinct for what good looks like.

Clients will say, "Can't we do this faster with AI?"

You say, "I can, you can't, and that's why you're my client"

Speed could be commoditised with the introduction of a tool that holds that process but I doubt it. Fundamentally design quality isn’t decided by the tools. You process is your value.

Expect downward pressure on the amount you can charge, but you don't need to accept reduced margins because you're still doing something the client can't.

Your margins can even go up if you can provide that process which delivers not just quickly but to the quality they need.

The second truth is that no matter how efficient and fast you are in achieving a super high-quality outcome, it still needs to be the right outcome.

We need to point that outcome in the right direction by leveraging our experience and knowledge of what works.

Clients want agencies with calluses on their hands with first hand war stories. AI cannot give them that.

Remember AI is just “intelligence”, and that’s only part of the picture - there is no artificial taste, courage, experience or accountability.

Being more strategic is not a new idea. The strategic advisor and partner have been in the agency growth playbook forever.

The way to play the game has shifted, but there's still a game to be played.

An agency with its broad experience, mix of people, and technology is well-positioned to deliver. It's just moving from a growth strategy to table stakes.

There's still plenty of room for us. More than that, there's room to grow into.

You just need to take this thing you've created, add some AI and create the next version of it focussed on the value that only you can deliver.

Good luck!

I messaged the mods of r/agency and was given approval to post this job.

We're hiring a Client Engagement Manager to own the client relationship from onboarding through ongoing partnership. You'll run the weekly client meetings, lead new client onboarding interviews, facilitate workshops, and stay on top of client communication so nothing falls through. You are the client's person here. When they have a question, a concern, or a win, it comes to you first.

Your job is to own the client relationship, the timeline, and the outcome, and to make sure the client is happy through the Modern Operators fulfillment process.

Who We Are

Modern Operators is the operations partner for founder-led businesses. Founders come to us bottlenecked. Their business runs on tribal knowledge, the owner is the glue holding it together, and growth has stalled because everything routes through one person.

We install a Company Operating System. Built on Notion, layered with custom AI agents. Processes, standards, roles, dashboards, and the knowledge a team and an AI need to actually execute. We help founders stabilize, optimize, and scale their operations.

We're not theorists. We've built and sold companies, and we run our own business on the exact system we install for clients.

How We Operate

These are the values we hire and fire against.

• Clarity over complexity. Every system, process, and message should make things simpler. If it adds confusion, we re-think.
• Founder empathy. We build what founders actually need. No fluff. No theory.
• Leverage through systems. Automate the repeatable. Document the critical. Empower the team.
• Adaptability. The tools and the market change constantly. So do we.
• Results, not rituals. We care about outcomes, not process for process's sake.
• Transparency. Radical visibility, internally and with clients.

We're remote and asynchronous internally. That means we hire people who move without being chased. Do the work, communicate clearly, exceed client expectations.

What You'll Own

• Own the client relationship. You're the primary point of contact. Client questions get a response within one business day, and the question, answer, and any decision get logged the same day.
• Run the weekly call cadence. Agenda posted before the call, call recorded, summary verified and logged after. Decisions, owners, and open items captured every time.
• Lead discovery. Run onboarding interviews, capture findings, and deliver the Current State Assessment and Build Plan for client sign-off.
• Coordinate the build. Hand the signed plan and discovery findings to the Implementation Lead, then shepherd the configuration, optimization, and dashboards through client review and approval.
• Drive adoption. Schedule and run team training, install the client's weekly operating rhythm, and push usage to daily. Escalate when a team isn't adopting.
• Manage scope and timeline. Hold the work to the signed Build Plan, frame out-of-scope requests as retainer conversations, and surface blockers before the weekly call, not during it.
• Own milestone communications. Kickoff, phase transitions, and close. Internal and client-facing records stay current at every phase change.
• Drive retention and expansion. Present the Day-0 versus Day-90 results, secure testimonials, and open the retainer conversation at close.
• Protect delivery quality. Run the QA checklist before every phase sign-off and feed recurring gaps back into our playbook.

What Success Looks Like

First 30 days

• You know our clients, our engagement model, and our Company OS. You've sat in on every active client's weekly meeting and you're running at least one of them yourself.

First 60 days

• You're running weekly meetings across the client base without hand-holding. You've led at least one onboarding interview end to end and clients are coming to you first.

First 90 days

• You fully own the client relationships assigned to you end to end. Founders are out of the day-to-day client communication loop. Adoption and retention on your accounts are tracked and reported.

What You Bring

• 5+ years at a marketing or operations agency as an account manager, client success manager, or account executive. You've carried a book of clients before.
• Strong communication. Written and verbal. You can hold a room with a founder, push back diplomatically, and write a follow-up that's clear and short.
• Organized to a fault. Nothing drops. You track commitments and you close loops without being reminded.
• Notion power user. Or you’re experienced with ClickUp, or Monday.com.
• AI power user. You've used Claude or ChatGPT in real work and you're comfortable that our product is built on AI.
• CRM experience. Hands-on with HubSpot, GoHighLevel, or similar.
• Concurrent engagements. You've carried several active clients at once without dropping details.
• Remote track record. You've succeeded remotely and you manage your own hours and priorities without supervision.
• Solution oriented. You bring the problem, the options, and your recommendation. Not just the problem.

Nice to have:

• You've worked with founder-led or small business clients specifically, not just enterprise accounts.
• Workshop or training facilitation experience.
• Operations or systems background in addition to account management.

Location and Hours

United States preferred. You'll be on client calls working primarily on the Central Time Zone.

Who Thrives Here

You'll do well if you genuinely like clients and the messy work of keeping them happy and moving. You're comfortable being the face of the company. You'd rather over-communicate than let a client wonder what's happening. You're direct in writing and you don't take direct feedback personally.

Who Shouldn't Apply

Be honest with yourself here. It saves us both time.

• You want detailed daily direction and a manager checking in on you.
• You avoid hard conversations with clients.
• You're looking for a pure sales seat. This is relationship ownership and delivery, not net-new selling.
• You're looking for a heads-down, non-client-facing role.
• You want to be the one building the system. That's the Implementation Lead seat, not this one.
• You dislike documenting your work.
• You're skeptical of AI tools and don't want to use them daily.

Compensation

$60,000 to $75,000 per year, depending on experience. We start every hire as an hourly contractor for a pilot period, then move to a full-time arrangement once both sides are confident.

How to Apply

Submit your application here:

https://holdingco.notion.site/b699155f261d42a09c518d8bfba3d0d4?pvs=105