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Chained to Efficiency, Starved of Meaning
- Romans Ivanovs
- May 3
- 5 min read
Early on, we all wing it.
You’ve got five - ten clients, a handful of contractors, maybe a Slack channel, a messy Google Drive and a few SOPs saved somewhere between “Client work” and “Stuff to fix later”.
You’re moving fast, testing assumptions and making decisions with partial data. There’s no playbook, just momentum.
It's almost like some sort of productive paranoia.
But while improvisation fuels the birth of a business, it rarely sustains its growth. The real challenge emerges when the business doesn’t die but matures.
What was once a scrappy experiment becomes a real company. Clients expect consistency. Teams need clarity. Leaders must scale their thinking beyond gut instinct.
At around $70K–$100K/month, your “scrappy” becomes scattered.
What got you here won’t get you to $3M and beyond.
In many cases, agency founders are so focused on client deliverables and bringing in revenue that they delay building internal infrastructure.
Process improvement feels like an “optional” project when compared to client work.
Additionally, in our experience, many mid-sized agencies simply lack experience in operations management – they haven’t created E2E (end-to-end workflows) before or they assume their team will just figure things out informally. Nor do they track time rigorously or review operational data to improve – leading to costly inefficiencies
As a result, the agency grows with tribal knowledge rather than documented processes. So the problems emerge: tasks fall through the cracks, projects run over deadlines and quality varies between team members.
Different team members deliver at different standards. Deadlines are missed, but no one’s quite sure why.
And yet when you step back and look at the tech stack, it seems impressive: you’ve got tools for everything. Project management, documentation, time tracking, automations, team chat, internal wikis, feedback forms, dashboards. But there's a big but... It's that the tool stack isn’t the system.
What often agencies really built is an expensive, bloated and ungoverned mess.
The deeper issue is this:
Tools are easy to add and hard to remove. Each one promises leverage but if you’re not careful, they create dependency instead.
Every minor update requires multiple steps across disconnected systems. Every new hire asks the same questions:
Where do I find the latest template? Which tool are we using for X? Who owns this process? And without a clear architecture behind it all, no one knows the answer.
You don’t fix a dull blade by buying a shinier handle - you sharpen the edge.
Before you add anything new, strip everything back.
Start by auditing what you already have. Not just the tools, but the workflows. The meetings. The documents. The habits your team has adopted to compensate for gaps in clarity.
Most agency systems aren’t failing because of the tech they’re failing because no one really knows how the business is supposed to run at scale. You’ve never sat down to define it.
So begin there:
Step 1. Audit your system end-to-end.
Pick one core workflow. Say, client onboarding.
Map out every single step, from signed contract to first delivery.
What tools are used?
Who’s responsible for each step?
Where does information live?
How many of those steps are redundant, duplicated or unclear?
Then do the same for other processes - retainer delivery, reporting, internal reviews.
What you’ll notice is this: most “systems” are a collection of inherited assumptions. Someone set it up once and now it’s just how things are done. No one questions it. Everyone works around it.
That’s where the waste lives.
Step 2. Next, kill what’s redundant.
Every tool you keep must justify its existence. Not in theory, in practice. If it’s not being used daily or doesn’t enable a clear workflow, it goes.
And if two tools are doing the same job, choose one. Consolidation is power. Every extra tool adds friction. Every integration you maintain is a tax on your team’s focus. Simplify ruthlessly.
Step 3. Then clarify ownership.
This is where scale breaks for most agencies.
No one knows who owns what. And so everything flows up to the founder. You can’t build a self-sustaining system if ownership is vague. Every process, every dashboard, every recurring task - someone has to own it. Not “the team”. Not “ops”. One person. One name. One point of accountability.
We often end up helping restructure our clients the teams. And yes, it means letting people go and hiring new people for outcomes we defined as a part of new organisational chart.
Most agencies fall into the trap of hiring for titles: project manager, strategist, designer, etc. But titles don’t drive outcomes. Responsibilities do.
A project manager’s responsibility might look vastly different in a $500k ARR agency compared to a $2M one. I've written a whole article about it: Beyond SOPs: Building a Team of Problem-Solvers.
Once ownership is in place, centralise what matters.
Create a single source of truth for your team.
Notion. ClickUp. Airtable. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that everything lives in one place. Your team should never have to ask, “Where do I find this?” or “Which version is correct?” If they’re asking, your system isn’t working. That’s on you, not them.
And then only then - rebuild from first principles (I which I could highlight this sentence in red)!
That means ignoring what’s trendy. Forget what the $10M agency you follow on LinkedIn is using. Design your system for how your agency actually operates, with the team you have, doing the work you specialise in. First principles means function before form. Strategy before aesthetics. Substance over software.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Your project management system reflects your actual delivery cadence - not what ClickUp templates tell you is “agile”.
Your internal reviews are built around client impact, not box-ticking rituals.
Your handoffs are defined, documented and tested, not assumed.
Your reporting isn't bloated, it gives just enough signal to drive the right conversation.
And remember this: a good system is quiet.
It doesn’t require constant updates. It doesn’t create status noise or tool fatigue. It creates space. Space to think. Space to lead. Space for your team to operate without constant input.
That’s the real goal of operational excellence. Not control. Not perfection. But space.
Because when you have space, you can finally do the thing you were meant to do: lead, not manage.
Final thoughts
I will share a core idea that’s helped many of our clients create more impact in their businesses without piling on more chaos: essentialism (borrowed from Greg McKeown)
Here's the gist:
Most people and businesses are busy being pulled in ten directions. But essentialists operate differently. They ask:
“What’s the one thing that really matters here?” And they build everything else around it.
This isn’t about minimalism or doing nothing. It’s about doing less but better. Fewer projects, fewer meetings, fewer decisions. More clarity, more momentum, more progress on what actually moves the needle.
Ready to build an agency that runs without you?
At Big Growth Group we help grow high-profit and self-sufficient agency businesses that let founders step away from daily operations and focus on strategic growth.
We’re not just consultants who leave you with a list of ideas.
We’re Growth Operators who work alongside you to deliver real, measurable results.
Are you an agency founder? Want to break free from operations and scale past $1M more easily and strategically?
Big Growth Show
And if you want no cookie-cutter advice, no hype... Just bold, polarising insights to help agency, consultancy and b2b service owners break through the $1M mark and beyond then watch the Big Growth podcast on YouTube or listen on iTunes or Spotify.
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