The Myth-Busting Guide to Agency Growth and Scale

How to Succeed in Web Design and Development

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IntroductionIf you want to grow your web firm, now is the time. There’s a 20 billion dollar market and a rapidly-evolving arsenal of development tools and resources at your fingertips, and the majority of websites have yet to adopt best practices. Take a look at the numbers:

That said, the bar for development talent has never been higher. Companies expect the team they hire to produce impressive results within their budget and time frame, often collaborating with other vendors and in-house team members throughout the project. This can be overwhelming if you’re a smaller agency, or a mid-size team wanting to take on the most competitive, coveted projects.

This guide is designed to help you overcome obstacles to growth. We bust seven myths that can hold you back from scaling up without breaking the bank. No new hires, no big investments, and definitely no holds barred.

65% are still not mobile-friendly

70% are using out-of-date tools

10m outages are detected monthly

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Why Listen to Us?

Before starting Pantheon, our founders managed their own successful web development agencies, helping to guide Chapter Three and Four Kitchens from small shops into established, profitable firms that continue to thrive. Our daily conversations with owners and partners at top firms frequently center on lessons they’ve learned as their agencies have grown in size and revenue. Learn from them and other industry experts in this guide.

The Myths

Jump around or take it from the top. We bust seven myths that can hold you back from scaling your agency.

The client is always right.

You must define the perfect niche before you can grow.

You need to be big to attract big clients.

Support work is boring, distracting and unprofitable.

Only big agencies need to worry about getting streamlined.

You can’t grow unless your team gets bigger.

Great teams require extravagant benefits.

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Myth #4

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Myth #7

Myth #1

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Your agency exists to do what clients tell you to do. If you do that, success will naturally follow.

Heard this one before? That’s because it’s incredibly common for agencies hoping to grow to take on whatever work will help them up their revenue. But it’s your responsibility to be thoughtful about the clients you take on, and how you interact with them. Acting on your strengths, your relationship with the client, and what they truly need is better than being the “yes” team.

TRUTH: Making clients successful is your top priority.

Doing only what your clients ask for may not make either of you successful in the long run. Consider these scenarios and how you might handle them:

1. Your client’s cousin built their custom, unintuitive, beast of a website. They ask for a mobile app, convinced it will make them seem “cutting edge” and boost their

user base. You can spend weeks developing a killer iOS app—but you know no one will download it.

They didn’t need an app at all. Their site was confusing, clunky, and put mobile users through a complicated series of zooming, scrolling, and clicks to get the information they needed. What they really should’ve asked for was a better user experience and mobile-friendly site, but instead they might blame you for their low adoption rate.

2. Your client has a tight budget, so they ask for low-cost hosting. You know saying yes will mean billing them more in the long run for administrative tasks and fire drills that arise with unreliable, low-cost server setups.

What they really needed was reassurance that they were making smart investments. They weren’t thinking of the long-term costs—just the monthly

Myth #1 THE CLIENT IS ALWAYS RIGHT

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bill they’d be getting for hosting. You could’ve helped them pick the best hosting and website management options and become their long-term technology partner, but now they’re coming to you when the servers crash.

There’s a fine line between authoritative and imposing. Striking the right tone with clients when you know they’re not asking for what they need can be a challenge, but the payoff is a lasting relationship with a client who knows you have their best interests in mind. These clients can make a huge difference in your career, sending you new business through referrals instead of chalking you up as “someone they tried but it didn’t work out”.

Myth #1 THE CLIENT IS ALWAYS RIGHT

ANTHONY CRESTODINA, COFOUNDER, ORBIT MEDIA STUDIOS

Clients often request features that have negative return on investment. It happens all the time. Here’s an example: A client called asking to add a rotating image area to their home page. They wanted it to appear just under the slideshow, which is another area of the home page with movement. But data and experience shows that it’s not effective to have two areas of movement on a single page, since they will compete with each other, dividing visitors’ attention. Their logic? “We’re a B2B company so we need to make the homepage less boring.”

This is not a good idea, and the client isn’t right. They’re making decisions based on opinion, rather than evidence and best practices. They aren’t seeing the site through the perspective of visitors and data.

The greatest challenge of the web designer or digital marketer is to educate the client, but do so in a firm yet empathetic way. The purpose of web design and digital marketing is to guide the visitors through a series of pages during which they become more educated and trusting. This is the key to lead generation best practices.

DO THIS NEXTPick one thing you know your client can improve on, and suggest it in your next meeting. Gauge their reception—are they happy you caught something that they didn’t? Are they open to change? If so, think about being more opinionated with your clients. Chances are they’ll be happy to have your input.

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If you don’t choose an angle and stick with it, you’ll never be able to focus and get the right clients.

It’s important to define your target audience, but just like a business plan, that first draft will likely get thrown out as soon as you find some traction. Web design and development agencies work in a unique market—there’s a ton of crossover in talent, and clients can’t always differentiate between what’s in and out of scope. Rather than obsess over your exact positioning, you can pursue several avenues and work out what’s most valuable over time.

TRUTH: Decide what your agency will excel at. But don’t wait for the perfect answer.

Myth #2 YOU NEED THE PERFECT NICHE BEFORE YOU CAN GROW

Sometimes, a niche makes sense. Are you a highly-specialized team that understands how to present complicated electrical engineering concepts to B2B customers? Or a firm known for their cheeky, offbeat interactive experiences? If you can answer the question, “What are we the best at?” without skipping a beat, then by all means don’t let anyone stop you. However, if you’re waffling on whether to specialize or approach a general market, there’s another option to consider.

Start with where your strengths are, but don’t add too many constraints. Work with clients you can get on board with—maybe you’re interested in the project, maybe you admire what they do, maybe it’s worth the money—but don’t ignore your values or promise things you can’t deliver. From there, identify which projects are most successful in terms of your relationship with the client, the impact on their ROI, your profit margin, and whether it will lead to support revenue or new projects. As you find your place in the market, be flexible enough to shift your focus to the work that allows your firm to prosper.

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Myth #2 YOU NEED THE PERFECT NICHE BEFORE YOU CAN GROW

Sit down and identify two things you know are holding you back. Go with your gut on one (“We’re weak on frontend work”), and look at the numbers for another (“Our lowest profit margins come from our hospitality clients”). How can you tackle these issues? Commit to making at least one change—whether it’s training your team, shifting your sales focus, or dropping an unrewarding project.

LESLIE BRADSHAW, MANAGING PARTNER AT MADE BY MANY AND COFOUNDER OF JESS3

I believe it’s less about finding a niche, and more about building a reputation. You can talk all day about what your specialty is, but you have to actually be known for doing exceptional work in that area before people will actually believe you. As you’re growing, lead with your strengths, and work hard to achieve a reputation. You’ll see a snowball effect—you might start out as a freelancer or subcontractor, then win a project just outside of your reach in terms of brand, prestige, and budget.

When I founded JESS3 in 2006, we partnered with other agencies. We would provide the insight into what was new in digital and social, and we would get a chance to do the projects they would win by having more people, more money, and stronger reputations. We’d do a project with them and that would turn into another, then we’d start working directly with the client. Eventually, we were on the radar of big companies. Around the fourth year, we got a call from Google—we’d built a reputation, they’d seen our work, and they called us because they thought we would be the best for their project.

It’s not always about pinning down your niche in terms of an exact technology or type of project. You’ve got to be able pull back, look at your larger strategy, and decide what the most productive approach is at the time. If you can win over the highly talented, skeptical people who are are behind innovation on the web, then you’re doing something right.

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Big firms get big jobs. Small firms get small jobs. If you want big jobs, you have to get big first.

To an agency competing for projects against much larger firms, it might feel like a hopeless battle. But those large competitors were once smaller, and they only got to where they are by attracting clients seemingly out of their reach.

TRUTH: Big organizations find your other qualities highly attractive.

Myth #3 YOU NEED TO BE BIG TO ATTRACT BIG CLIENTS

If you don’t have the logos or name recognition to easily snag big contracts, there are plenty of things you can do to close the deals you’ve been dreaming about:

Describe your work with confidence. Promote your projects in terms of solutions instead of brands. Fill your portfolio with a killer project for each potential scenario you might pitch to a prospect.

Build the street cred of your individual team members by speaking at events, hosting meetups, writing articles for online publications, and flaunting your expertise on whatever platforms are most useful for finding business.

Write in-depth case studies and tutorials about specific technical problems that will actually help people and be found in searches. When you pitch a big client, speak passionately and authoritatively about those projects and their outcomes.

Be generous with your community. Share what you know with other professionals and don’t ask for favors in return. You’ll develop a reputation as a helpful and knowledgeable expert, which can come back around when a big project arises.

Team up with other creatives for out-of-scope work. There’s a difference between taking on work you know nothing about and accepting a project that calls for a little hired expertise. Know your weaknesses and fill them with an extra designer or developer on contract.

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Myth #3 YOU NEED TO BE BIG TO ATTRACT BIG CLIENTS

Start building your database of creatives to collaborate with when needed. Be ready to serve future clients by adopting modern workflows and project management tools now, so you know you can follow through on big promises before a big prospect comes to you.

Use tools that can automate repetitive tasks and reduce overhead. With a small team, you can move faster by not starting from scratch on every project. There are plenty of tools to automate sysadmin work, create custom code bases, build templates for project phases, and set up workflows for better project management.

There are a couple of advantages smaller firms can typically flaunt over large agencies. One is your nimbleness. Tell your prospects why you can get to market faster: your close-knit team, your lack of bureaucracy, your agile workflow.

The other is your dedication to each client. When you’re not spread thin and your leadership team is accessible, clients get better service. Companies know this, and they’ll choose a smaller firm if they feel confident they can execute well. Confidence and authority go a long way in getting the deals you want.

BRIAN WEBSTER AND JORDAN JENNINGS, COFOUNDERS, DELICIOUS SIMPLICITY

We almost passed on the opportunity to build a big media project a while back. Developing a high-profile website on a compressed timeline with a launch date less than one month away? We’re a two-person agency with a small team of contractors. Without a clear, streamlined development workflow in place, it wouldn’t have been feasible to create and maintain an environment capable of withstanding the inevitable traffic spikes and hack attempts. We ended up automating a lot of the sysadmin work that would’ve been our downfall, and that’s the reason we not only accepted the project, but also hit our launch target, building the new site start-to-finish in one month.

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Once a site has launched, it’s time to move on. The budget is spent and support work is drudgery.

Back when website launches meant one big overhaul every few years, this may have been true. Support work meant basic DevOps tasks and fixing broken things. Now, websites require iteration—pushing many small improvements and frequently adding new features. There’s opportunity for more collaborative, ongoing, and profitable relationships in the form of support agreements.

TRUTH: Offering support can keep everyone happy while opening up new revenue streams.

Myth #4 SUPPORT WORK IS BORING, DISTRACTING, AND UNPROFITABLE

Support work is valuable, important to your clients, and an excellent source of reliable income. But there are a few things to attend to before it can be profitable. Ask yourself these three questions before you ramp up your support revenue strategy:

Have you built streamlined, repeatable processes for sysadmin work, security updates, commonly-asked-for features, and project management tactics?

Have you automated as many non-billable or time-consuming tasks as possible?

Are you confident in your ability to iterate and test new features quickly and safely? 3

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If you can say yes to all three, your potential for a profitable support operation is looking good. Here are some things you can offer your clients after their website goes live (or, after you inherit an existing site).

Security updates and rapid response to announced security breaches. Use a website management platform with easy-to-deploy updates to keep client sites secure without any configuration or use of senior developer time.

Incremental improvements to the site. Now is the time for all of the “phase two” ideas to come into play. Suggest and decide on regular feature-adds or site improvements with your client and become their long-term partner.

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User testing and feedback. The more you can test a site, the more likely you can call it a success. Help your clients do user testing and optimization to uncover new insights into what motivates their target audience.

Performance tuning. Give your clients the fastest speeds and highest uptime possible by using a reliable website platform and tools that automate performance checks. Run regular tests and share them in weekly or monthly reports to give clients peace of mind that their site is in good hands.

Support work can be a reliable source of recurring income. If you can automate the tedious tasks and focus on valuable client deliverables, you’ll stay on with clients longer and be top-of-mind for new projects.

Myth #4 SUPPORT WORK IS BORING, DISTRACTING, AND UNPROFITABLE

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Myth #4 SUPPORT WORK IS BORING, DISTRACTING, AND UNPROFITABLE

Go back to the three questions on page 10. Did you answer “no” to any of them? If so, see what our free agency product can do to help.

MASON JAMES, CTO, WP VALET

It often seems like a line is drawn between consulting and support. The latter is seen as being reactive, painful, and often existing without much thought to scope or budget. Consulting, which typically happens before the project is finished, is seen as highly profitable, engaging, and rewarding. But the reality is that both require the same problem-solving and thorough understanding of the requirements for success—we consider support to be inclusive of both proactive, strategic activity and rapid response to unexpected issues that may arise. It’s also critical to the success of any business.

To make support a successful and enjoyable source of revenue, you’ll need to focus on communicating well and providing consistent service to your clients. By understanding their needs, ensuring they stick to best practices, and bringing innovative ideas to the table, you can build a stronger relationship. You’ll be positioned for more upsells, referrals, and testimonials. And as you spot common support issues among clients, you can use them to create helpful documentation and procedures for the rest of your client base. Support, for us, is one of our most valuable lines of business.

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Small teams can handle everything on the fly.

Startups and small agencies often make the same mistakes when it comes to efficiency. The excitement of diving right in makes it feel like there’s no time for rethinking process. Then, when a few demanding projects happen concurrently, the whole team is scrambling to find the resources they need.

TRUTH: The best time to get streamlined is before you’re in a crunch.

Myth #5 ONLY BIG AGENCIES BENEFIT FROM STREAMLINED PROCESSES

Success as a growing agency relies in part on smart distribution of resources, so take the time early on to become efficient and scalable. When the pressure is on, you’ll be equipped to handle any high-profile client that comes your way.

You’ll want to start with the most impactful areas. These are good things to focus on because, left unattended, they can add up to a great deal of unbillable hours and overhead that eat into your profit margin.

Custom codebases. Creating custom installs or distributions can make starting a new project easier, especially if your focus is on a specific vertical. A retail site, for example, will need the same commerce-related modules or plugins as many others have already implemented. If you can spin up a site with the basics included, you’ll get to market faster.

Workflow. Stay true to continuous integration best practices. Using version control and identical dev, test, and live environments will let you produce work faster, keep bugs out of production, and always know what your team is working on.

Project management tools. Eventually, you’ll forget a deadline or lose track of that email thread. When you’re still on the smaller side, invest the time or money into a

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Myth #5 ONLY BIG AGENCIES NEED TO WORRY ABOUT GETTING STREAMLINED

Consider creating a custom upstream so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel for each new web project. See how ASU does it.

good project management system. Make sure you can collaborate with clients, track milestones, assign tasks, and receive alerts when a deadline is in danger.

A website management platform. If you’re managing more than one site, you’ll save time and money managing them in one place. Using a platform like Pantheon, where hosting and website management tools are all included, can cut down most of the error and repetition associated with managing multiple projects.

The best thing about streamlining and standardizing is that they let you do more with the same resources. When an opportunity comes along, like a slew of new clients or a huge project, you’ll be able to handle it like a pro without hiring, stressing, or neglecting your existing business.

JOHN STUDDARD, COFOUNDER, BIG COUCH MEDIA

We did six big launches in three weeks at one point. The fact that we were able to pull it off was a huge win for us. There is no way we would have been able to do that in our old environment—we would get into this mode of constantly moving sites around, having multiple instances of them cloned, then having to do manual merges of code. Now we’re using identical dev, test, and prod environments on one platform. The ability to do quick updates, to push code quickly, to determine what’s changed—this allowed our team to scale more than I thought we ever could.

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If you want to take on bigger projects or more clients, you’ll have to hire more designers and developers.

Hiring is an investment, and can help you grow steadily over time. But often you’ll want to scale up without putting thousands into a new hire, whether they’re a contract or full-time employee. Don’t get caught up in thinking that more people=more productive. Rather, think about how to do more with what you have.

TRUTH: You can do a lot more with the team you already have.

Myth #6 YOU CAN’T GROW UNLESS YOUR TEAM GETS BIGGER

Growth isn’t all about new hires. You can improve your profit margins and productivity in other ways. The first thing to consider is your price. Is your agency charging what you’re worth? Don’t be afraid to raise prices on clients whose work isn’t profitable—or at least opening big doors. You might consider trying a different pricing structure, too.

You should also take a close look at your design and development activities. Are you an agile operation? Is each team member actively working at honing their expertise in their craft? Spend time figuring out your best workflow, stop or outsource what doesn’t yield good results, and team up with other professionals when you need a new skillset for a particular project.

If you’ve already made your current process as efficient as possible, you can automate certain processes and free up your team for revenue-generating work. What can you automate or simplify without giving up flexibility and control over important client projects?

Sysadmin work. Sysadmin tasks take time and often aren’t billable. And most of the time, developers would rather be doing actual development work. Urge your clients to choose a website platform that doesn’t leave the DevOps work to your team members—and one that allows them to scale without completely overhauling their infrastructure.

Security measures. Installing updates and responding to security announcements take time if you’re manually implementing changes for each client site. Find a platform with security features built in and handle security-related tasks in minutes.

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Myth #6 YOU CAN’T GROW UNLESS YOUR TEAM GETS BIGGER

Add up the amount of hours per month you spend on DevOps work. How could you better use that time? What could you offer your clients in place of it?

Website management. Managing a portfolio of websites without an easy-to-use, centralized location to do so can lead to hours of searching, emailing, and fixing mistakes. Simplify your process with a tool that gives you a control center for your entire portfolio—a single developer can manage more sites without an added workload.

The more of your current resources you free up, the more work you can take on without adding team members. When the time to hire does come, you’ll know that new hire will be using their time in the most efficient, valuable way.

RICK WEBB, COFOUNDER OF BARBARIAN GROUP AND AUTHOR OF AGENCY: STARTING A CREATIVE FIRM

The number of people in your shop is only one factor affecting revenue and margins. The ecosystem of marketing, design, and communications is varied, and there are many job roles and skillsets a firm can offer. If you’re looking to grow your firm without significantly increasing your headcount, consider the changing the breakdown of the type of work you’re doing. You could potentially own a larger scope of a project rather than a smaller piece of several.

For example, instead of having an agency composed 100% of designers, consider one that is comprised of designers, engineers, UX practitioners and strategists, and product managers. Each of these roles has different competitive rates and different economics—some of them are significantly more profitable than others. When a client project arises, you can capture the “whole budget”. Often, handing the budget to a single vendor is more cost-effective for the client. You can decrease ramp-up time, minimize overhead, and do a more efficient job managing the project, giving the client better results and bringing in more revenue for your agency.

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Successful agencies have foosball tables. And free lunches. And puppies. If you want great people, you need better toys.

While the ping pong table was becoming synonymous with being a fun, successful startup, you were busy hustling to get your first few clients. Now that you’re thinking about how to scale, you’re wondering if you can afford to entertain the highly sought-after developer talent you’re hoping to bring on board.

TRUTH: Keep your team happy by giving them opportunities to do creative, high-value work.

Myth #7 GREAT TEAMS REQUIRE EXTRAVAGANT BENEFITS

Giving employees the benefits they deserve is an important part of building a successful business. But overcompensating with frills won’t keep your team happy if they don’t have a place to showcase their talent.

Web design and development is full of creatives who are motivated by meaningful and challenging work. Find and retain top talent by letting them focus on high-value projects. If you’ve automated and streamlined what you can, you’ve gotten rid of a lot of the drudgery already.

You can further empower your team members by giving them the tools they need to do their jobs properly, spending time on training and professional development, and mentoring junior developers as you give them increasingly autonomous roles. Project lifecycles have different opportunities to engage your team. Senior people can focus on strategy and complex tasks, while junior people can learn something new on each project. Bringing a mix of both to a project

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Myth #7 GREAT TEAMS REQUIRE EXTRAVAGANT BENEFITS

Ask your senior team members what they need to be more productive. Ask your junior members what new challenge they’d like to take on. If it’s not cost-prohibitive, give it to them.

can be great for all, providing training for your junior people, validation for your senior people, and exposure to different ways of thinking for everyone.

Your people are your product, and clients hire your agency because of what you can deliver together, as a team. Every investment you make in that team—in things that make people happier and more productive—is an investment in the quality of your product. They’re worth it.

MICHAEL HOFFMAN, COFOUNDER OF SEE3

At See3, we’ve learned that employee motivation extends far beyond salary. While salary is important—people do need to pay their rent—many of our employees came to See3 because the mission of working for social good appeals to them. Our entire team shares a value that our work matters, not just to us for our own benefit, but for the world. We work for organizations like the Make-A-Wish Foundation and the Foundation Fighting Blindness, and produce campaigns that fight for privacy rights, the environment, and children’s health. It’s easy to get motivated to go above and beyond for our clients, and it’s been a big part of our success.

Our mission extends to how we treat our employees. We are getting B Corp certification to enshrine the idea that the company exists not only for shareholder value, but for the benefit of the employees, the client, the community and the environment. In our benefits, we treat our team like grown-ups who are self-motivated. We trust them to be responsible and empower them to grow personally and professionally. None of this costs a lot of money, but it’s an approach that says, “we’re a team and we’re all in this together on a mission to change the world.

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Your Personal Path to EnlightenmentIs your mind blown yet? We hope so. As a growing agency, there’s always a way to look at things differently. Before you head down any path, consider your other options and how they’ll impact your team’s productivity, happiness, and bottom line.

Your developers want to love their jobs. Your clients want to love your work. Give that to them by turning old advice on its head and taking your agency to the next level.

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