
Ask HN: Are web/marketing agencies inherently difficult to scale? - ccajas
I&#x27;ve worked for two agencies but have much more experience with one than the other (4 years vs a couple of months). I want to know if this is the typical life cycle of a web marketing agency that is largely B2B to small-medium businesses.<p>I saw their company in two different &quot;stages&quot; of its life when I&#x27;ve worked for them. First as a junior contract developer making about half of local median pay (the contract mentioned a shift to full-time with higher pay but never followed through on that). In my first time working there, the business was being run from another company&#x27;s sublet rooms. Structure was &quot;top heavy&quot; over 50% being management that delegated tasks to off-shore teams. Being a local dev in the company was a rarity.<p>Two years have passed, at some point I was seeking work and decided to go back to my old company since the founder was interested in having me do consulting work for them. I was paid just slightly more than my time as a junior dev, and usually put projects that had clients that didn&#x27;t interact with the other employees beside myself and the PM. It was very silo&#x27;d in. Pretty much, do the work that their regular employees don&#x27;t have time for.<p>During this time they had already moved into their own dedicated office. There are still a lot of kinks in the armor but at least things feel more organized in the company. Local dev team is still barebones with the management largely directing off-shore workers. And then I started thinking, if this is 3 years of growth I wonder what is the next step to take this business to the next level.<p>Do agencies form some proprietary tech that make them attractive for large co&#x27;s to pick it up and buy them? Is that a general case? I am not thinking of starting a business, but I don&#x27;t see if there&#x27;s, if any, way to properly scale up to a national level. Is the agency model just inherently restricted to scaling? Could they expand their vision and scale up?
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PaulHoule
I don't know if a web agency is hard to scale but there is no benefit to the
agency or the customers in doing so.

Long ago, I worked for a failing agency which had once been the largest in
town and the founder was convinced the problem was price competition from
individuals who didn't have to pay for the overhead of a secretary, sales
staff, health insurance, etc. I think the problem might have been more was
that was intimidated by price competition and would lowball quotes for jobs
such that we made a small profit on 4 out of 5 jobs and gave it back and then
some on the last job which we quoted too low.

If you are successful your salespeople and devs will realize they can make
more money working on their own account (after all you've busted your ass for
years and thing you deserve the money instead of them.) Then they leave, you
have to hire new people who are less experienced, and you've got more
competitors to deal with.

Another issue is that the technology base of an agency inevitable erodes.

That firm was early to the web and used a rather unusual language with a
"visual programming" interface for making web pages. It was way ahead of its
time in 1997 the same way Cold Fusion was and was an advantage for them at the
time.

They got the beat down from an up and coming company that was using mainly
Ruby on Rails. (Actually I walked out of the first company and got a job at
the second two days later)

A few years later that Ruby shop was heading for the tubes and everybody was
struggling to retool to make single page applications.

Ten years from now the "Google Platform" will be a ghost town and the next
thing will be Gopher++ or something.

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bhartzer
It comes down to management. Management needs to understand how
SEO/Marketing/Digital Marketing works and they need to know how to scale it
properly. It takes a lot of internal training and knowledge of that industry.
There are a lot of meaningless tasks that digital marketing companies do that
aren't moving the needle for clients.

I'd look at client retention rates, as well. A good agency should have high
client retention rates. If they're just bringing in new clients for a few
months and then the client leaves, then there's something seriously wrong.

