4 Keys to Growing Your Agency

I’ve been building systems for different businesses lately—agencies, consultancies, service companies. And I keep noticing the same four things come up, regardless of what the business actually does.

These aren’t growth hacks. They’re just… how it works.

1. Do Not Automate Until It’s Extremely Painful Not To

Yeah, I know. Weird thing to say for someone who builds automation.

But when you’re early, your biggest advantage is that you’re flexible. You can change things. You can do stuff that doesn’t scale. That’s actually good.

The moment you automate something, you’re locking in a way of doing it. If you haven’t figured out the best way yet, you’re just making it harder to find it.

Think about it: an established marketing agency might have their proposals fully automated. Templates, one-click send, very efficient. But they also can’t really customize it for the specific client anymore.

You? You’re doing two proposals a day. You can actually read the client, figure out what matters to them, and write something that hits different. That’s your edge. Don’t throw it away by systematizing too early.

Automate when it hurts not to. Not before.

When you do decide it’s time, check out 3 Conditions for a Successful AI Implementation—our recommended checklist before adding AI into your workflow.

2. Use the Least Amount of Tools Physically Possible

I’ve seen this so many times. Someone finds a new tool with one cool feature, and suddenly their stack looks like:

• Pipedrive for CRM
• Asana for tasks
• Monday for projects
• Notion for docs
• Mailchimp for emails
• Stripe for payments
• Xero for invoices
• QuickBooks for accounting

Eight tools. Eight logins. Eight places where stuff lives. Eight subscriptions.

Look—yes, there’s probably a tool that’s “better” than what you have. But switching has a real cost. Migration sucks. Retraining the team sucks. Data gets lost. And maybe the new thing is better, maybe it’s the same, maybe it creates new problems.

Before you switch anything, just ask:

If not, leave it alone.

3. If Team Members Keep Making the Same Mistakes, It’s Probably Your Fault

This one’s annoying to hear but it’s true.

Same mistake once? That’s on them. Same mistake five times from different people? That’s a systems problem. And systems are on you.

You should build processes that require the least amount of talent possible. Not because your team isn’t good—but because even good people have bad days, and talent is expensive anyway.

There’s a reason big companies use SAP (even though everyone hates it). It has required fields. You literally can’t move forward without filling in what matters.

Simple rules:

• Something keeps getting missed → make it required
• Something follows a predictable pattern → automate it
• Something needs checking → build the check into the flow, not after

Better systems = less babysitting = actual leverage.

4. Measuring KPIs Should Be Built In, Not Extracted

This one’s a bit more technical but probably has the biggest payoff.

Here’s what I see all the time: team tracks projects in a Google Sheet. Statuses, deadlines, whatever. Works fine day-to-day.

Then end of month comes and someone has to “generate a report.” Export the sheet, mess around in Excel, make some charts, send it to leadership.

This is backwards.

The act of updating a status, sending work to a client, getting feedback—that stuff should already be feeding your numbers. Automatically. No extraction needed.

Your dashboard should just… update itself. Measuring things shouldn’t be a chore. It should just happen as part of how work gets done.

Yeah, it takes more effort to set up. But tools like Make.com and Airtable have made this way more accessible than it used to be. Put in the work upfront (or get someone to do it for you) and you’ll benefit for years.

None of this is revolutionary. But it’s the stuff that actually matters when you’re trying to grow without everything falling apart.

1. Stay flexible until automation is necessary
2. Fewer tools, less chaos
3. Fix systems, not people
4. Measure automatically

That’s it. Get these right and everything else gets easier.