My Agency Vision for an Incredibly Profitable Business

The conventional agency model of scaling a productised agency is dead in most industries.

“Just productise your service and scale, bro” is just far too simplistic advice these days when dealing with the harsh realities of what most agency owners face.

The barrier to entry is lower than ever, leading to an influx of competition.

Conventional sales channels that enabled scale are now dead, such as cold email, and are being replaced by slower, more compounding channels (like content, events and referrals).

And AI is being built into a lot of the software that services were built around to remove us as middlemen, improving the customer’s margins and reducing the need for our services.

A pivot is needed to a new alternative.

And I believe I have the best-proposed solution to circumvent this reality.

In fact, I believe what I’ll present to you today is a far superior business model to pursue that will take most agency owners to their financial goals quicker, healthier, and feeling more fulfilled and less burnt out.

THE PROBLEMS WITH SCALING SERVICE-BASED BUSINESSES

The fundamental issue with service-based businesses compared to models like SaaS and ecommerce is that they don’t scale as efficiently or pain-free (this is an excellent article covering the nuances I frequently refer agency owners to).

The dynamics of ‘scale’, combined with the harsh new realities facing agency owners is leading to countless conversations on whether to pursue the business model.

Agency work has been tarnished as an “entry-level entrepreneur”-type business, which I think does a huge disservice and ignores the new opportunities at our disposal for growing our businesses.

But the fundamental truth that any agency owner who has tried to scale is in fact true: humans just don’t scale like software or products coming off a conveyor belt does.

And as you grow in size, your organisation can become more bloated and inefficient due to layers of middle-management diluting your margins.

More people problems, less money in your pocket. A recipe for stress.

MY FUTURE AGENCY VISION

I am a believer that agencies can be absolutely phenomenal businesses as long as their subject matter expertise is democratised and distributed in ways that serve economies of scale.

In layman's terms, this means sharing your knowledge openly, building a sizeable audience and monetising that audience in the form of digital assets, training programs and communities that are higher margin, more fun and less stressful than adding more low margin clients to your books.

This doesn’t mean abandoning the agency business model of servicing clients entirely. It’s simply seeing it as a means to an end – one that fuels more profitable ventures by sharpening your skills and building up a specialist knowledge base that others want to learn from.

Once you’ve acquired those skills and built an audience along the way, you then strategically pivot your distribution to selling to that audience in more focused ways.

Here’s a diagram that illustrates what this looks like:

At the top of the flywheel, we have our standard agency offering; the bread-and-butter service we’ll be using to develop and deploy specialist knowledge.

But true leverage comes into action when we PUBLICISE this knowledge across social discovery channels where our ICP consumes information.

For me, that means LinkedIn & X. But for you, it may mean TikTok or Instagram.

Simply go where your audience hangs out and do everything possible to ensure you get your content in front of them.

And yes, pay to make sure they consume it if necessary.

Digital Products

Digital products are the natural evolution of building an information-specialist business and courses are the next logical asset you can monetise and sell.

I’ve written a huge amount on courses in the past and recently shared this video as well so be sure to check that out if you want to learn more about why I advocate for every agency owner to produce one.

Trainings

An engaged audience also paves the way to dedicated, 1-to-many workshops. These can be hourly - or daily - trainings whereby you train teams on your methodology and give them the secret sauce.

You can charge upwards to $1,000 per participant and get 8-12 people in for a day’s workshop. It’s a highly profitable, repeatable system which creates powerful advocacy for you in your ecosystem.

Cohorts

I experimented with my first cohort model at Content Army recently. It’s got a lot of challenges in securing another lead flow to make them a focus point, but once you’re there, the business model is actually very appealing and largely automated.

You don’t do any of the implementation but you guide people through your methodology and hold them accountable with a small team.

For Content Army, we would help them define their positioning, ICP and content pillars, and then simply review their content over a period of 8 weeks.

The onboarding is the most intensive part of the program and then the rest of it is essentially weekly check-ins to make sure the client is applying the learnings and needs support.

Highly profitable and scalable system but it the downside is it requires a high velocity of clients coming in through the funnel. The upside is it’s super high margin and leads to insane word of mouth.

Community

This may be the hardest to unlock but potentially the one with the most upside and leverage if executed correctly.

Imagine having a private Slack channel, Skool community or Discord group where you charge a monthly subscription for access to your complete knowledge base and masterminds.

I’ve held off this model and given it the least attention simply because it’s higher risk and a bigger commitment than the others, but it’s the one that you should really double down on to create insane WoM once you’ve built a very large audience within your ICP.

That being said, I’m always considering this so don’t be surprised if I make a move at some point… watch this space.

Conclusion

Don’t believe people who say agencies can’t become great businesses.

The goal to unlocking your true leverage as a subject matter expert is not to keep your knowledge hidden behind closed doors for the sole benefit of your clients but to share it freely with the world to reap all of the fruit that it bears.

If you’re able to build an audience, the opportunities to monetise are limitless and I’m going to prove it in 2025 in public.