How businesses benefit from the “next-generation web agency” model

Growth and ROI-focused

Problem

Agencies focus on delivering their services without a solid understanding of the key drivers in your business. The newest tech or the most advanced code may not be the best option for your business.

We’ve had clients come to us with web solutions that have cost them 4-5x what they should have due to the lack of focus on understanding their business needs. At Represent, we understand this challenge firsthand. We repeatedly searched for a marketing agency that truly grasped our business and could provide the value we needed, but eventually gave up after several painful and costly attempts.

Represent’s approach

We started calling it “business-first”. It wasn’t super clear, so we’re now talking about being a “partner in growth” and “ROI-focused”. The idea is the same; as an agency, we need to care about and understand your business to help you make smart tech choices. We often say, "Sure, we love technology, but it’s just a tool to help build your business”.

Our favorite thing to do is to challenge our clients and push back when they ask for features we don’t believe will pay off for them. It’s so clearly a short-term loss for us while the trust this approach builds is a long-term win for everyone.

Why it matters to our clients

Having an agency that understands your business can be incredibly valuable. Building the wrong thing can be very expensive and painful. Every line of code we write should make sense for your business.

What’s left to do?

We’re currently exploring how to better align our financial incentives with those of our clients. Today, our billing remains hourly-based, reflecting the belief that clients invest more when we deliver clear business value. Looking ahead, we may explore models where we share in the financial upside or downside when specific business objectives are achieved or not.

Compact and efficient

Problem

Large teams are often expensive and inefficient.

Represent’s approach

Efficiency has always been our thing. From how we continuously improve and refine our processes to how we use videos for documentation and tutorials in dedicated help centers for our clients.

Our most exciting experiment in this area has been: “How far can we grow Represent without hiring dedicated project managers?” The answer? “All the way!”.

The first iteration of this experiment was that we only hired senior designers and developers that could work directly with clients. Our senior advisors would manage the more complex projects.

As we grew past 12-14 people we started feeling friction and needed more people who could lead teams and projects. That led us to our next experiment; a combined developer / tech lead / project manager role. We introduced weekly training sessions with two well-suited and motivated team members and quickly saw the benefits of having technical project managers who were also hands on in code. We have since hired for this specific role and now have five “technical project leads” at Represent, handling clients, teams, and projects.

Growth has a tendency to cripple efficiency. More people often leads to new roles and ways of organizing. We have made a deliberate choice to slow down our growth and land at around 22-25 team members. If we would grow past that, we would have to restructure and risk losing efficiency.

Why it matters to our clients

Lean and efficient teams with fewer people and roles removes hurdles in communication, increases efficiency, and saves our clients money every day.

Clients like PowerOffice are super happy that their main point of contact at Represent not only manages their projects, but also functions as their day-to-day advisor and can even jump in to solve issues without delegating.

What’s left to do?

Our agency manager and team of five leads meet for an hour a week to further improve the way we do things at Represent. There’s no shortage of topics and ways to explore how we can make the agency-client processes and relationships even smoother.

Open and inclusive

Problem

As a client, you don’t understand the details of what your agency is doing or if your money is well spent.

Represent’s approach

Transparency can be scary. Hiding behind closed doors and communicating to your client when you feel good and ready feels much safer.

We have decided to be as transparent as we can. Our mindset is that we form “one team” with our clients. More “us”, than “we and you”.

Our systems and processes are designed to be open and transparent. We use Notion for tasks, documentation, timelines, helpdesk, and reports that is all accessible to everyone involved in the project.

We exclusively hire seniors with excellent communication skills who match our open and inclusive culture. We communicate openly in Slack channels, and our clients don’t have to talk through a project manager to the people doing the actual work.

Everyone involved in a project should know what is going on and what the status is at all times. In addition to weekly meetings in active project periods, we share weekly reports every Monday that are available to everyone on the project. These include details about what was done the previous week, plans for this week, challenges, timeline status, and financial status.

Why it matters to our clients

Our clients can feel safe knowing what’s going on and that we are not hiding things from them for our own benefit. The trust that comes with transparency is valuable in fostering long-term successful relationships.

What’s left to do?

We're currently exploring ways of helping clients better understand the current state of their technical solution and their ROI. We want to ensure we are always keeping solutions up to date and our clients aware of new opportunities. We have just started an experiment around this with some clients.

Flexible and scalable

Problem

Most agencies have a fixed capacity and will by default have one of two problems:

1. Have too much to do, are overworked, and may be unable to deliver high-quality work within your desired timelines.
2. Need work for their idling team members and are incentivized to sell you more than you need.
   

Represent’s approach

Over the last couple of years we have solved two aspects of scalability, allowing us to be super flexible to meet our clients’ varying needs for our capacity.

1. Since the beginning, we have hired talented people who value work-life-balance and are comfortable with a two-way flexibility in terms of workload. If they want time off to travel to Japan for a month, that’s fine. They may choose to work half-time by default, and we may ask them if they can step up to full-time if we need some extra capacity. At this point, we always have capacity for our clients, and we don’t have any dissatisfied team members who do not get enough work.
2. For us to be able to scale this model after our successful initial experiments, we could not rely on standard recruitment channels. We invested a lot of time into building our own unique recruitment rig. We can now attract and hire the specific talent we need, with very strict criteria for cultural match and more, within weeks, and at very low cost.

Our approach to flexibility has also “forced” us to design ways of working that are not person-specific. We are able to onboard new developers to any project in hours, reducing risk and onboarding cost for clients. On the other hand, we are very specific about the people we hire, and you can expect a personal touch!

Why it matters to our clients

Knowing that they’re never committed to spending any money on our agency, combined with the option to scale up and down with short notice, is something many of our clients are super happy with (and very much not used to!). They avoid time and money going to waste, and business-critical and sometime unforeseen deadlines can be met.

What’s left to do?

Our development capacity scales exceptionally well. Design and advisory resources are trickier to scale quickly, as they currently represent a smaller part of our delivery. We’re working on solutions both internally and with partner design agencies.

Focused and selective

Problem

It’s impossible to be the expert at everything. Agencies that say yes left and right tend to end up scattered and the quality of their work gradually declines. Their clients end up paying more for less.

Represent’s approach

Looking back, we attribute much of our success to the sometimes painful choices we have made to stay focused and say “no” to tons of opportunities and ideas that could benefit us short-term.

There are loads of CMS, eCommerce platforms, and programming languages. We have chosen to focus exclusively on a handful of them that are all in the sweet spot between “modern” and “battle tested”. These market-leading tools let us build modern, safe, and sustainable solutions for our clients with minimal risk.

If we are asked to build a solution on WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Optimizely, Contentful, or any other platform we don’t specialize in, we kindly guide people to either better solutions or other agencies. In the short-term, we would benefit from just “taking their money”. But in the long-term it would threaten our agency’s focus, efficiency, and ability to provide high-quality and flexible assistance to all our clients.

Being narrow and specialized can sometimes lead to agencies thinking they have a one-size-fits-all solution to anyone and everyone. We do not believe that our tech stack is for everyone and every project, and we are very open and transparent in our advice to go with other solutions if we think it’s a better option.

Recently, a potential (big) client came to us and asked for a quote to build their intranet. They were considering three options; Sharepoint (current), another intranet product, or a CMS. We would be quoting a Sanity CMS-based solution. It would be a super interesting and fun project! Instead of jumping at the opportunity, we met with them and advised on a different approach including a deeper preliminary project in parallel with extending their existing Sharepoint license to buy time. They may come back if they learn that a CMS solution will be the best fit for their business, and if they do, they know they can trust us to guide them with their best interest at heart.

Why it matters to our clients

As an example, if your web solution is built with Sanity CMS, you want your agency to be focused on that CMS. Both to leverage opportunities and to reduce risk that comes with limited team capacity and competency. At Represent, ALL our 20 developers specialize in Sanity CMS. We know the team at Sanity very well. We speak at their conferences. We follow their every move. That focus is valuable.

What’s left to do?

We’re still navigating situations where an opportunity looks promising—especially with existing clients—but pursuing it would mean adding another platform to our stack. Is it worth losing a client to stay focused? It’s a tough call. We always aim to act in the client’s best interest, and sometimes saying no to one client can ultimately benefit the rest. The key is avoiding the trap of spreading our team too thin across too many platforms.

Easy and fun to work with

Problem

The common frictions of an agency-client work relationship can be frustrating.

Represent’s approach

All of the above solutions to common agency-client problems contribute to an easier relationship that is more fun and engaging. We’re all human and we enjoy good times. Removing friction and getting good people together is highly motivating to us.

“Start with Who” - Why we do things and how we do them matter. For us, who we’re doing them with matters the most. We choose to work with ambitious businesses and people that match our open and friendly culture, and we make it our business to bring a smile to their faces :)

PS: My business partner Alexander says his kids told him that we can’t use text-based smileys anymore…that it’s weird…is it really so?? Anyway, you’ll have to look really hard to find even a contract from Represent without a smiley in it. Because smile we do ;)

Why it matters to our clients

Because you’re human! You want more joy and less stress. We should work really hard at that together ♥️

PS again: I use the :hearts: emoji (from a card deck) because I much prefer it over the default glossy heart emoji. I could weave that into our philosophy of building solid solutions over glossy solutions, and so I did.

What’s left to do?

Balancing the personal and professional is an ongoing challenge. Being fun and easygoing only works when the systems and processes around our team are solid enough to ensure nothing falls through the cracks. We’ll never stop improving in this area—it’s a crucial part of our culture.

BONUS: Building a wealthy and healthy team

Problem

There’s an unwritten rule in most agency’s about overtime. “Agency life is crazy”. People are expected to work their behinds off without getting compensated for their overtime.

Represent’s approach

Building a sustainable agency is at the top of our priorities. That includes a sustainable business, a sustainable model for working with clients, and a sustainable way to keep our team members healthy and motivated.

We have had our challenges. In late 2023, right before we cracked the recruitment problem, many of our team members were tired. Once we had the capacity solved, we are at a point were no one team member needs to work more than they prefer. On the contrary, we actively encourage team members to go at a healthy pace, and strongly discourage working when weighed down by health issues.

Here’s how we focus on contributing to five types of wealth (read the book) for our team members:

Why it matters to our clients

Happy people are not only a joy to work with, but significantly more constructive and productive!