What happens when you stop being the biggest client.

The person who pitched you was senior. They knew the sector, they asked good questions, and you signed partly because of them.

Eight months later you are dealing with somebody else. Your changes take a fortnight instead of a few days. The senior person appears on calls occasionally, sounding slightly briefed. Nothing was announced. You have simply stopped being the account that matters most.

It is structural, not personal

An agency that grows has to keep the structure fed, and that means winning larger accounts than the ones it has. Larger accounts get the senior people, because that is what wins and keeps them.

Those accounts often run a year or two before moving on again, so the cycle repeats. Everybody below the current biggest client gets managed by whoever is available. It is not malice. It is what the model requires.

And the team you were shown

Agencies of any size flex up with freelancers. That is not a secret and there is nothing wrong with it in principle. Sometimes they will go and find someone who has worked in your sector before, which is a sensible thing to do.

It is worth following that through, though. The sector expertise you are paying an agency for was bought in for your project. You could have found those same people yourself, paid them more than the agency did, and still spent a fraction of the total.

Then the project ends. The freelancer moves on. The agency keeps the relationship but no longer has anyone who actually knew your project. Next time you need something changed, whoever picks it up is starting cold.

The continuity you were paying for was never there.

Where the money goes

A Chief Executive. An Operations Director. Business Development Managers whose job is to keep pulling work in to cover the wage bill. Executive and Personal Assistants. Departments you are not buying anything from. The office. Everything else a company that size ends up carrying.

Call it forty, fifty, sixty thousand a month to keep the lights on and keep the thing moving. Which means turning over five, six, seven hundred thousand a year simply to be open, before anybody has done any work for anyone.

The designers and developers actually making your website are on a fraction of what the people above them earn, and they are the ones who cycle through fastest.

The people doing your work are the cheapest line on the list.

They are the ones doing the creative work and giving you the thing you actually asked for. Which raises a fair question about how much of everything above them you need to be paying for.

Which is why it costs what it costs

There is no good reason for a website or a platform to cost a hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand pounds. The work does not require it.

The structure does. Every quote has to carry a share of everything above it, and most of what sits above it will never touch your project.

For some clients that structure is absolutely fine, and I would say so. If you need the scale and the process that comes with it, go and get it. For most of the businesses we deal with, there is no reason at all to be funding a company that has to turn over half a million or more a year before it opens the doors.

I chose not to build any of it. No Chief Executive, no Operations Director, nobody selling. I would rather pay down my mortgage than fund a floor of people who do not improve what a client is buying. The payoff for going smaller is a simple one, and it lands in the quote.

We are not at the same end of the market

Worth being straight about this. Large organisations often cannot appoint a studio this size, and that is a legitimate constraint rather than a judgement on anybody’s work. Procurement wants audited accounts, insurance thresholds, headcount and continuity plans. A large agency is the right answer to that question.

What I would say is that a fair number of our clients came to us having already been through it. Not because the work was poor, but because the value was not there and neither was the attention once somebody bigger signed.

No awards here either

We were nominated once, for the Motorsport UK TV platform. Going meant six thousand pounds for a table in Spain, to remain a nominee if somebody else had paid more. We did not go.

The record is what we have built for people. If you look at that and see the value in it, that is the only verdict I am interested in.

If you take one thing

Ask who will be running your account in eighteen months, whether they are employed or contracted, and what happens to that answer if a client three times your size signs next quarter. Costs across this industry have got out of hand and the work has not got better to match. The answer to those three questions tells you most of what you need to know.

Three more
worth the time.