Lessons Learned: Scaling an Agency

It's been three months since Airship, An Unosquare Company was acquired. Over the years I have valued counsel and advice from others. I have never met an experience or person from who I haven't taken a lesson away. After spending a significant portion of my professional career building a successful agency, I wanted to offer some guidance to those that may be looking to do the same.

Airship, An Unosquare Company has been a significant part of my life, and I have invested my identity in the business for seven years (10 years on paper, but that's another story). Selling a business is a huge milestone for a founder, and selling a services business is an even more significant milestone due to its typical dependency on the founder or founders to deliver the service. Unless the founder replaces themselves intentionally with amazing people and a trusted brand, the chances of a successful exit are unlikely. Before Airship, my co-founder and I worked in SaaS. We worked for one of the most admired SaaS companies in Birmingham, and we built our own SaaS company, which we exited in 2016. The lessons learned from these experiences played a critical role in shaping Airship and led us to a successful outcome. Working in these environments also taught me the importance of sharing lessons learned with others, and I have found a lot of value in those that have shared with me over the years.

Let me set the stage with a hot take: we would all like to believe that what we do is different from other agencies out there, that our “process” is unique, and that every other agency doesn’t deliver a service like ours. But the truth is, your “process” and what you do are probably identical to thousands of other agencies out there. Through the years, I became less and less surprised when I saw other agencies have services with the same name and promises of value. What I learned is that your “process” and what you do is not your competitive advantage; it’s who you are. It’s your experience, your values, your team, your mission, and the way you treat those around you, be it clients or team members (crew members in our case). It’s how you strive to always get better, the humility you show when things aren’t working, and having a clear vision of who you exist to serve.

Below are just a few key lessons that have led to Airship’s success over the years and continue to be a big part of the success we continue to see today.

Save the creativity for the client

Wait, what? We are a creative agency… it’s literally our job to get creative! Yes, but only when that creativity is pointed at how you add value to your clients. Too often we get creative in how we run the business instead of letting some things be boring. If you are spending brain power on which metrics to track, how to invoice, or how you estimate the work, I suggest you look to learn from others. A great place to start is by reading the book Managing the Professional Services Firm and putting the knowledge into practice, especially as you are getting your company off the ground. Again, you’re not so different than other agencies out there, and the successful ones are focusing their creativity on service delivery, not how to invoice.

Expectations are better than estimates

One of the first questions a prospective client is going to ask you is “how much does it cost to get what I want”. If you’ve been in business for more than a day, you’ve encountered this question and likely spent a lot of time trying to answer the question with as much detail as possible. Guess what, your estimate was wrong as soon as you wrote it. When dealing with creative work, estimating is the most challenging, and most poorly communicated deliverable we try to concoct. Because the truth of the matter is, if you’re structuring your services appropriately, the client plays the biggest role in that answer.

That’s why, a few years ago, I stopped asking our team to be the “best estimators in the world” (I really was saying that) and instead shifted to us being the “best expectations setters in the world”. This mindset shift was very impactful. Instead of coming up with a new spreadsheet calculation, we focused on “what does the client need to know about what they are getting into”. We added a new section to our Client Lifecycle called “Expectations” and focused our efforts on ensuring we reduce the number of surprises along our journey to deliver value. We shifted to things we could control, and timelines we could have confidence in, and got good at selling that. Since we implemented this way of thinking, we’ve had much greater success and much happier clients.

This takes a lot of experience to get right. Early-stage agencies don’t know what they don’t know so coming up with expectations will be very challenging. Spend some time thinking about what your clients need to know at each stage in your process. What surprises could they encounter that could lead to a bad experience? What can you do today that could shine a light on those potential surprises? When you encounter a new surprise, write it down and add it to your expectations document.

Productize your team, not yourself

One of the biggest challenges of scaling any agency is removing the founder from day-to-day operations. When we sold our SaaS business and focused solely on Airship, we were the product. Adam and I did everything that it took to manage the business but also did all of the billable work. We love building products and we are good at it too, but we were the ceiling of the organization. The moment we started to turn the keys over to others to provide the service and help with operations, a few monumental things happened.

1. We were starting to live out our dream of creating a business where OTHERS could live their purpose and grow.
2. We were able to focus our problem-solving skills ON the business which allowed us to see the forest from the trees.
3. We became much more valuable to those looking to buy a services business like ours.

The shift out of the spotlight takes a lot of courage and identity wrestling, but on the other side, it also brings freedom and success for so many others. Make it a goal to have a future client not even know your name. It’s a great feeling.

Not everyone is your customer

Knowing your customer is key to developing a repeatable and scalable sales and marketing engine. As importantly, knowing who isn’t your customer is key in building a team of people who are attracted to your culture and continue to stay engaged for years. These lessons take a lot of intentional messaging, courage, and a willingness to forgo short-term revenue for long-term success.

I used to say “technology is industry agnostic, we can serve them all”, while that is true, it’s very hard to build a sales and marketing engine focused on every industry in the world, and let’s be clear, you need a sales and marketing engine to scale. Have you taken the time to identify industries that best align with your service offering? Depending on your maturity, this could be something you get to plan for while you’re small or something you must identify based on your team’s capabilities as you’ve grown. It’s typically simpler to plan ahead than to retroactively try and find the best fit for a larger team but we did it and found success.

A successful client relationship doesn’t end with the market that meets your target market, they also must align with your target customer persona. Personas are a critical piece in identifying the types of organization you want to work with and one that you can serve best. Less about the market they are in, and more about how they do business and how your service can fit into the way they do business. For instance, at Airship, we not only developed client personas for the right and wrong clients, but we also developed axioms that described how we look to interact with our clients and what makes a healthy relationship. This took most of the subjectivity out of relationship issues and gave our team a shared set of values that we could point to if a client relationship happened to be going sour.

These exercises of identifying our target markets, articulating our client personas (right and wrong clients), and setting standards for what a successful relationship looks like skyrocketed our engagement internally and for our clients. It’s led to tremendous, long-term, relationships and a team that feels valued to speak up when things don’t look quite right.

Build a culture of growth mindedness

In a sea of competition, you stand out by always doing what you say you will do or making it right if it’s impossible to do so. There is a low percentage of agencies that make it past 20 people, that percentage drop significantly at 40 and above. You don’t grow that much by chance, it’s only by delivering a great product or service and holding on to a level of service that can seem financially incomprehensible. Even when we were small, we had this mindset. Over the years I wrote off hundreds of thousands of dollars in invoices (literally) because it was the right thing to do for the business and/or client. When you’re only bringing in $200k a year, a $10k write-off hurts but I sleep soundly knowing that it likely helped that company live a while longer and that our reputation stayed intact.

One of my favorite quotes is from John Maxwell where he says “Experience is not the best teacher; evaluated experience is the best teacher.” While you will fail at times, the most successful companies are the ones that take the time to understand why. When we fail, we don’t throw parties, we throw retros, which sometimes turn into parties because of how awesome our team is, but I digress. We analyze how we got into the situation and determine if a change needs to occur to prevent it from happening again. Importantly, we make sure not to get confused with a problem to solve vs a tension to manage. Not all failures need fixes, some just need clearer expectation delivery and an understanding that things happen.

If you build your culture around being open to change and understanding and continue to drive the point that what got us here won’t take us to the next step, you’ll see a lot of success. This should be rooted from day one.

Conclusion, for now

While there are thousands of lessons learned over the years, I feel these are the most pertinent and actionable for those looking to get off the ground or scale their services business. I am speaking from the standpoint of a service business owner but many of these lessons are also rooted in my years in product. I hope you gain something from these words. I hope you find a way to incorporate them into your business. I hope you find more success having read them. I’ve run into thousands of brick walls along my journey of building Airship. Adam and I collectively have spent more time solving problems on the business than in our previous life of just writing code. I’m proud of what we built in Airship and proud that these lessons above still holds true today.

We have an amazing team of problem solvers who have experience in setting expectations and delivering on promises. We are now much bigger and more equipped to do this on a larger scale. If you’re an early-stage agency owner and want to chat, please reach out to me. If you’re a technology company looking for an agency that goes much deeper than just writing code or creating wire-frames, one that solves the problems you have in a very holistic approach, I recommend reaching out to us. We’ve done this before and would love to serve you.

#agency #scale #business #strategy #success