Show Notes
Nobody wakes up in the middle of the night wanting more design, a new website or a retainer – they want what those things get them, and most agencies still sell the thing rather than the result. In this episode, Callum puts Gareth in the hot seat on why the standard agency model of offering a list of services into a market full of identical lists is under threat: why agency services are hard to sell and even harder to buy, why a vague offer always ends up priced down, what a productised service actually is (and what it isn’t), the three forms it can take now that AI is in the mix, and the one exercise Gareth ran with an agency this week that changed how they saw the value of their own work.
In this episode
- Why “nobody wants your agency services” is literally true – nobody wants a website or SEO, they want more customers, more sales and more control, and the service is only the route to it
- The plumber test: why Gareth didn’t want a plumber, he wanted the leak fixed – and why agencies solve needs just as real but far more latent, so they have to make them visible
- Why agency services are hard to sell (every brief scoped from a blank page) and even harder to buy (thousands of agencies listing the same thing to clients who don’t fully understand it) – and why the pitch day exists to de-risk a decision the client can’t otherwise make
- Why a vague offer pushes every deal towards the cheapest price, how Callum sees the same problem in estimation, and why AI won’t help with either until the service is defined well enough for it to know what it’s estimating
- What a productised service actually is – your existing skills, packaged around the client’s outcome with a name, a fixed scope, a fixed price and a timeframe – and why “Brand Identity Sprint” is the wrong name for one
- The three types: the productised service, the AI or technology product the client uses directly, and the hybrid where technology does the work whilst you guide the client through it – and the two things that trip agencies up on that middle route
- Where to start: get your senior people in a room and list the problems you solve, not the services you offer – and why the highest-value clusters are often not where the bulk of the work goes
