4 steps before you become an Agency
The story is as old as time.
Solo expert launches their service-based business.
Solo expert gets busy.
Solo expert gets inquiries they can’t service immediately… doesn’t want to say no to revenue… and hires people to help them with the work.
Voila—you’ve officially begun an Agency business model, though you didn’t mean to.
This is one of the common routes to unexpectedly becoming an Agency.
Another is to hire specialists to do targeted work you can’t do in delivering your core service, or to band together different service providers and go to market as a collective, which is a whole different can of worms (and which Jamie Cox via Revenue Rulebreaker covered in some detail).
But today, we’re focusing on scenario one: hiring because demand outpaced supply.
A full calendar must mean it’s time to hire for delivery, right? Who turns down work?
Actually, for most expert businesses, hiring someone else to deliver parts of your core service is probably the last thing I’d do.
Time and time again, when experts scale up before getting their foundations solid, they take home less money while working more than they would have staying solo.
Revenue rises. But so do contractor costs or payroll.
The founder still has to sell the work (and more of it), scope the work, answer the difficult questions, review the deliverables, manage the client relationship, and often redo parts of the work.
They’ve delegated some production, but they haven’t actually delegated the judgment or responsibility.
The result is a bigger business with more moving pieces, more risk, and often less money left for the founder.
We’re told the goal is to make more revenue.
But really, the first goal should be to become profitably oversubscribed. (h/t Daniel Priestley).
1. The economics can support another person
Your business needs to do two jobs related to money.
One, it needs to pay you a reasonable market rate for the hours you’re putting in.
And two, it needs to bring in a profit.
Odds are, you’re currently subsidizing your business with labor priced far below market rate.
If you paid yourself a reasonable rate for every hour you spend delivering, would the business still produce a meaningful profit? And at your current prices, could you pay someone qualified to do part of the work without wiping that profit out?
Your profit also isn’t simply leftover salary. It needs to cover the expenses and the risk of being a business owner. That profit is part of your long-term compensation for building and carrying the business.
But many experts hire before the business is paying them a reasonable salary and producing consistent profit. Then they bring on another person whose compensation depletes the margin they were counting on to pay their own bills.
Before you do that, review your existing agreements, your pricing, your client mix, and your value proposition.
Could this business model actually support someone else?
Or do you need to bring your value proposition and pricing in line with the actual cost of delivering profitably through a team?
Of course, those pricing changes rarely happen in isolation. They often require changes to who you serve, how you serve them, the relationships you build, the way you communicate your value, and the client experience you deliver. Much better to make the changes now before you make that hire.
2. Demand is repeatable, not episodic
Before hiring, I don’t just want you to have a capacity blip where some extra demand suddenly appeared.
I want you to be consistently oversubscribed with the right clients.
This doesn’t mean that every month looks identical. It means you understand where qualified demand tends to come from, you know which activities help create it, and you repeat those activities with confidence and regularity.
In the space between “currently over capacity” and “consistently oversubscribed with profitable clients,” you have leverage.
You can say no to clients who will be a bad fit or who are unwilling to pay your new rates (See step 1).
You can narrow the type of work you accept.
You can test a waitlist.
You can make your marketing more effective now, before you need to scramble for clients later.
And while you do that, you can collect cash and protect time in the business to build the systems you’ll eventually need.
3. The work has been codified without losing the secret sauce
When you bring on a team to work with you—not just refer work to a trusted collaborator—you’re ultimately responsible for the outcomes.
But as experts, we get very used to just doing the work.
We don’t notice our expertise: the questions we ask, the judgment calls we make, the patterns we recognize.
We also haven’t articulated how the work happens: the process we follow, the outputs we create, and the way we onboard, communicate with, and guide the client.
Much of that is probably trapped in your head.
If every deliverable still depends on your tacit judgment, you haven’t created a scalable service. You’ve created work that another person can assist with while you remain responsible for thinking through almost all of it.
That means it will be difficult for someone else to take over—and even if they do, the work may not be completed in the way you want it done.
This is the time to codify your “secret sauce.”
I talk about this in the Authority Loop foundation.
You need to map and document how you deliver and how you think about the work before you can ask anyone else to do it with you.
While this sounds like more work, it has two benefits.
Yes, you’re documenting what you’re doing so someone else can eventually take over parts of it.
But you’re also making the entire process more effective and efficient for yourself now.
Creating better tools for clients, improving your delivery process, standardizing useful parts of the work, and even creating AI skills or agents that someone may eventually use all create leverage before you hire.
You may discover that you can serve more clients without adding another delivery person at all.
Or you may discover exactly which parts require your expertise—and which parts genuinely can be handed off.
4. The work is visible outside your head or inbox
When experts stumble into hiring, they tend to manage the work through email, Slack, and memory.
What happens? Crossed wires, a mess of deliverables, and things falling through the cracks.
And, spoiler alert: I’d bet at least a few things were already falling through the cracks before anyone was hired.
An Agency requires the work to be visible outside the founder’s head, inbox, and desktop.
What are the milestones of every project?
What’s due this week?
Who owns the next step?
Where does the draft live?
Who sends the final version?
What standard does the work need to meet?
At minimum, someone other than you should be able to see what has been promised, what happens next, who owns it, and when it is due.
You don’t need a giant, complicated task-management system before you hire.
But you do need a way to stay organized.
This creates several benefits.
With a higher price point comes the expectation of crystal-clear communication and customer service. Instead of manually gutting that out each time, you can build it into your workflows and continue demonstrating value throughout the engagement.
When you organize the work, projects become more efficient, effective, and standardized—or you begin to see where the work legitimately needs to flex.
And when you eventually hire, you’re prepared to onboard and manage someone with clearer expectations, communication, and documentation.
So what would I hire for first?
If all of this sounds like a lot to do before hiring someone for delivery, you may be thinking:
But I still need more revenue and time because I need the space and cash to have someone to help me set all of this up.
Take a breath.
Don’t look to hire a junior version of yourself.
Instead, I’d look for support that helps you strengthen the business around your expertise, to become more profitable, organized, visible, and effective before you add the responsibility of another delivery person.
Sharpen your copywriting, messaging, and sales materials so your value proposition attracts more of the right clients at more sustainable rates.
Look for adjacent experts who can help you set up the systems you need: a project-management expert, a bookkeeper, or someone who can help you document and standardize the way the work happens.
Hire administrative support to get routine coordination, scheduling, client follow-up, and basic operations off your plate.
I go into this in more detail in Chapter 9 of my book, Leaving the Casino, where I introduce the Hiring Matrix—a framework for deciding what to outsource first based on the foundations your business already has in place.
Don’t rush to hire simply so you can do more work, market more work, manage more work, and then find yourself exhausted when you don’t make meaningfully more money.
Go back to Step 1 and take your time.
Use the cash you create and the space you protect to build the infrastructure one step at a time.
An Agency isn’t just the natural next step when a solo expert gets too busy.
It is a distinct business model—one that requires stronger economics, steadier demand, transferable delivery, and visible operations.
Until those pieces are in place, the wiser move may be to remain solo, charge more, choose better clients, and build leverage.
We’re in this for the long game, not to burn bright and burn out.
Here are the Five Foundations for the Agency model:
Business Design:
Choose the model on purpose. An agency isn't what happens when a solo calendar fills up—it's a distinct model with its own economics, and the test is whether the business pays you a market rate for your hours and still turns a profit before you add anyone. If it only works because you're underpricing your own labor, hiring doesn't fix that—it just gives the gap a payroll line. Get the pricing in line with the cost of delivering through a team first.
Relationship Rhythms:
Prove the demand repeats before you staff for it. One full month is a blip, and a team (even just contractors) turns that blip into a fixed cost. What you want is to be consistently oversubscribed with the right clients—you know where the qualified demand comes from and you run the activities that create it on purpose. The goal isn't more revenue. It's becoming profitably oversubscribed, before payroll is the thing depending on it.
Building Blocks:
Get the work out of your head and inbox. Before anyone can carry a piece of it, the work has to be visible: milestones, what's been promised, what's due, who owns the next step, what standard it has to meet. You don't need an elaborate system—you need someone other than you to be able to see what happens next. Most of what falls through the cracks in a growing agency was being run on memory long before anyone got hired.
Authority Loop:
Codify the judgment, not just the tasks. Most of the expertise is trapped in your head—the questions you ask, the calls you make, the patterns you catch—and until it's mapped, you've built work someone can assist with while you stay on the hook for all the thinking. This is the Authority Loop: documenting how you deliver and how you decide. The payoff isn't only future hiring. It's a tighter process and better tools now, and sometimes the capacity to serve more clients without hiring at all.
Root by Root Planning:
Sequence your hiring. The first person you add shouldn't be a junior version of you—it should be the support that makes you more profitable, organized, and visible: admin, systems help, sharper sales copy. Use the cash and the protected time to build the infrastructure one step at a time, which is what the Hiring Matrix in Leaving the Casino is for. Delivery is the last seat you fill, not the first.