#90: How a Boutique Agency Stayed Profitable by Doing Less, Not More
Most agency owners start the same way: a few freelance clients, strong execution skills, and a belief that if you just do great work, growth will follow. That was the pattern I’ve seen over and over again, and it’s exactly why I wanted to unpack this conversation.
The real challenge isn’t getting an agency to survive. It’s getting it to scale without chaos.
In this episode, I sat down with Mark Meyerson, former Director of One Egg Digital, to talk about the realities agency owners don’t see on Twitter or LinkedIn: hiring pain, slow scalability, margin pressure, and why some of the best operators eventually look outside the agency model to fuel growth.
This conversation wasn’t about hacks. It was about business design and why combining an agency with a product business can create leverage most founders never consider.
The First Bottleneck Every Agency Hits: People
If there’s one universal constraint in agency scaling, it’s hiring.
Agencies don’t break because founders lack demand. They break because:
Good people are hard to find
Great people are even harder to keep
Every new client eventually requires more staff
Early on, it feels manageable. But once you move past a handful of clients, every growth spurt introduces operational strain. More delivery. More management. More coordination.
Mark was clear about this: hiring is the hardest part of running an agency and it’s also the most underestimated.
Why “Hire Fast” Is Bad Advice
One of the most counterproductive ideas in the agency world is urgency driven hiring. When delivery pressure is high, founders rush.
The better approach?
Hire slowly. Test deliberately. Validate with real work.
At One Egg, this meant:
Multiple interview rounds
Practical assignments (real audits, real tasks)
Contract or part time trials before full time offers
This isn’t about being cautious for caution’s sake. It’s about protecting your operations, your culture, and your margins.
Skill can be taught. Motivation and curiosity cannot.
How to Actually Identify A-Players (Without Guessing)
One of the biggest myths in hiring is the idea of a universal “A-player.”
In reality, performance is contextual. The same person can be exceptional in one environment and mediocre in another.
What consistently predicts success?
Curiosity: Do they ask better questions than expected?
Motivation: Do they go beyond the brief without being asked?
Ownership: Do they treat test projects like client work?
When we talked about hiring processes, a clear pattern emerged: the best candidates don’t just meet the requirements, they redefine them.
They deliver early. They communicate clearly. They improve the output instead of just completing it.
If someone doesn’t impress you when they’re on their best behavior during the hiring process, it’s unlikely that trajectory improves later.
Why Niching Down Fixes More Than Marketing
Many agencies resist specialization because they fear losing opportunities. In practice, the opposite happens.
Niching down improves:
Client acquisition (clearer positioning)
Operations (repeatable delivery)
Profitability (better margins, less chaos)
Mark was direct about this being one of his biggest hindsight lessons: niching earlier would have made growth easier.
When you focus on fewer services and fewer verticals:
Sales conversations improve
Expertise compounds faster
Internal systems simplify
From SEO to PPC to Amazon advertising, each channel is already complex. Trying to master everything across every industry creates hidden inefficiencies that slowly erode profitability.
Specialization isn’t a branding exercise. It’s an operational strategy.
The Real Scaling Problem With Agencies
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Agencies are great cashflow businesses but they scale slowly.
Even a top-performing agency doubling year over year is doing extremely well. But that growth comes at a cost:
More staff
More management layers
More delivery oversight
This creates linear (or worse) scaling dynamics. Revenue grows, but complexity grows faster.
That’s where this conversation took an unexpected turn.
The Opposite Business Model: Product Companies
During COVID, Mark and his team launched Amazon brands as a side project. What started as experimentation became a second engine.
Here’s the key insight:
Agencies and product businesses are opposites.
Agency Model
Cashflow positive
Predictable billing cycles
Limited scalability
Product Model (Amazon, eCommerce)
Cashflow intensive
Long payback cycles
High scalability
Product businesses consume cash before they generate it. Inventory, manufacturing, shipping, and delayed payouts all create pressure.
But once a product works, growth can be exponential.
These two models solve each other’s weaknesses.
How Running Both Creates Leverage
When you operate an agency and a product business, several advantages emerge:
1. Skin in the Game
You’re not just advising clients, you’re applying the same strategies to your own businesses.
That credibility changes sales conversations immediately.
2. Cashflow Engineering
Agency profits fund inventory and experimentation.
Product upside creates long term value beyond billable hours.
3. Better Strategic Thinking
Running a product forces sharper thinking around:
Offers
Positioning
Unit economics
Systems
These lessons transfer directly back into agency client acquisition and operations.
A Practical Path for Agency Owners
This isn’t about abandoning your agency.
A smarter approach looks like this:
Build a small, profitable, specialized agency
Optimize for cashflow and clean operations
Use that cashflow to test product ideas
Let the winners scale without linear headcount growth
Not every agency owner should do this. Focus still wins.
But for founders feeling capped by delivery and staffing constraints, this hybrid model creates optionality.
The Bigger Lesson: Design the Business You Want
The most important takeaway from this conversation wasn’t about Amazon or hiring tactics.
It was about intentional design.
Agencies fail when founders inherit a model instead of questioning it.
Scaling isn’t about doing more. It’s about choosing structures that compound.
When you understand how cashflow, operations, and scalability interact, you stop chasing growth and start engineering it.
That’s the difference between running an agency and building a business that funds its own future.
If you want to go deeper, you can run the full version at agencyuplift.co/mini.Even if you never book a call, the clarity alone is worth it.
