#98: Why Adding More Services Is the Fastest Way to Kill Your Agency
Most agency owners don’t wake up one day and decide to build a company that can scale, operate without them, and eventually sell.
They wake up with too many clients, not enough time, and a creeping sense that the thing they built to feel free is slowly owning them.
That was Tim Keen’s story.
Tim is the founder of Loop Club, a DTC performance marketing agency he scaled to ~15 employees and just over $2M in annual revenue before selling in late 2022. His journey wasn’t clean or methodical. It was chaotic, impulsive, stressful and incredibly instructive for anyone serious about agency scaling, profitability, and building something that doesn’t collapse under its own weight.
This isn’t a story about hype or hacks. It’s a story about what actually happens in the messy middle of agency growth and how to avoid making your business fundamentally unsellable.
The Accidental Agency Owner Problem
One of the most consistent patterns in the agency world is what I call the accidental agency owner.
You start as a practitioner. You’re good at your work. Clients come in. You hire help. Suddenly, you’re running payroll, managing delivery, closing deals, and putting out fires all at the same time.
Tim didn’t start Loop Club with a grand vision of building an agency.
He fell into it.
Coming from music and then working at a large agency (MuteSix), he assumed chaos, long hours, and constant pressure were normal. When the pandemic hit, clients piled up. Good intentions (“let’s pay our friends,” “let’s build something together”) turned into headcount, debt, and obligation.
At some point, there’s no going back.
You’re not freelancing anymore. You’re running a business whether you’re prepared or not.
This transition is where most agencies break.
Year Two Is Harder Than Year One (And No One Tells You That)
The first year of an agency is usually fueled by adrenaline and novelty. Growth feels fast. Wins come quickly. You convince yourself you’re onto something.
Year two is different.
For Tim, year two was the hardest phase by far:
Revenue stalled after early growth
100% client churn over the year
100% team turnover
Endless calls, zero calendar control
Constant stress and decision fatigue
By his own description, the agency was a completely different organism by the end of that year.
This is a critical lesson for agency owners chasing scale:
Survival through year two matters more than explosive year-one growth.
If your systems, positioning, and service model can’t survive staff churn, client churn, and founder burnout, you don’t have a business, you have momentum that will eventually run out.
The Hidden Skill That Carried the Business
Despite the chaos, Loop Club landed clients that were objectively “above its pay grade.”
$70,000/month retainers. Seven-figure ad spend. CFO level scrutiny.
This wasn’t because the agency had superior execution.
Tim is very clear about that.
The differentiator was rapport, positioning, and language.
Tim had an unusual ability to:
Meet clients in their language
Adapt to different levels of sophistication (PE, DTC operators, scrappy founders)
Create trust quickly
Be genuinely helpful before selling
He would dissect a prospect’s business live on the call, identify real problems, and articulate them clearly, often better than their internal team.
This skill alone can unlock client acquisition at a much higher level than your delivery maturity would suggest.
But there’s a catch.
You can close enterprise clients this way.
You can’t keep them without operational depth.
And this is where many agencies get trapped.
Why High End Clients Expose Weak Operations
Tim kept some very large clients for about six months.
Then the CFO shows up.
And the questions start:
Why does this cost what it costs?
What’s the ROI?
Why are we paying for complexity?
This is where sloppy service design, unclear scope, and founder led delivery get exposed.
High ticket clients don’t forgive:
Undefined processes
Founder dependency
Inconsistent outcomes
From an exit perspective, these issues are fatal.
A buyer doesn’t care how charismatic the founder is.
They care about repeatable outcomes, predictable margins, and low key person risk.
Which leads to the single most important insight Tim shared.
One Service, One Niche, Everything Else Is Pain
If Tim could go back and give himself advice at the beginning, it wouldn’t be about tools, hiring, or growth tactics.
It would be this:
One service. One niche.
Not because it’s sexy.
Because it compounds.
A great agency business is boring by design:
One clear input
One repeatable process
One predictable output
That’s how you scale operations. That’s how you improve profitability. That’s how you build something sellable.
Tim makes a crucial distinction:
You must decide whether you want a fun life solving complex problems or a great business.
Those are not the same thing.
Consulting is complex, bespoke, and intellectually stimulating.
Agencies that scale and sell are optimized machines.
Trying to do both usually results in burnout and a business no one wants to buy.
The Myth of “Adding Another Service”
Most agency owners respond to stagnation the same way:
They add services.
New channels. New offers. New verticals.
It feels productive. It creates dopamine. It postpones hard decisions.
But in reality, it dilutes:
Messaging
Delivery quality
Team focus
Sales clarity
Tim had seen large agencies with multiple services work but only after they dominated one niche with one core offering.
Trying to replicate a 300 person agency structure with “three people and a Notion doc” is a guaranteed way to break yourself.
Sales Doesn’t Need to Be Complicated (But It Does Need Commitment)
After selling Loop Club, Tim worked with 300+ agencies, consultants, and B2B businesses.
The patterns are painfully consistent:
One-channel reliance (or no channel at all)
Founders dabbling at 20% effort across five tactics
Completely unclear positioning
Fear of committing to a single ICP
The fix is not more tools.
It’s sequencing.
A Simple Sales Workflow That Actually Works
Decide who you sell to (industry, role, maturity)
Decide what you sell (one outcome, one service)
Identify where they already spend attention
Speak to them in their language
Commit to one primary outbound channel (LinkedIn, email, or both)
Talk to people consistently
That’s it.
The reason this feels hard isn’t because it’s complex.
It’s because it removes excuses.
Outreach Is No Longer Optional
In today’s market, waiting for inbound is not a strategy.
Agencies must proactively create conversations.
Tim is blunt about this:
You need to get in front of people and talk to them.
The engineering comes later.
Most founders obsess over how:
Tools
Automation
AI
Fancy workflows
They skip who and what.
If you get those wrong, no amount of tooling will save you.
Meet Clients Where They Are or Stay Invisible
One of Tim’s biggest unfair advantages was language.
He didn’t talk like an agency.
He talked like his clients.
This matters more than almost anything else in sales.
When your messaging matches:
Their vocabulary
Their priorities
Their internal conversations
Trust accelerates.
Deals close faster.
And your entire business feels lighter.
Very few agency owners do this intentionally.
Those who do change their trajectory quickly.
Building a Sellable Agency Requires Intentional Boredom
Loop Club sold.
But Tim is clear: it could have been a much better exit with fewer mistakes along the way.
The takeaway isn’t regret.
It’s clarity.
If you want:
Sustainable agency scaling
Real profitability
Optionality at exit
You must design for those outcomes early.
That means:
Fewer services
Fewer niches
Clear positioning
Repeatable delivery
Founder restraint
It’s not glamorous.
But it works.
And in a world full of janky agencies held together by hustle, the boring ones win.
Every time.
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.
