Want to scale your creative agency? In this article, I’m going to share 8 steps to scale your creative business so it can run without you. Ready? Let’s go.
I’m Connor McAuley from Move at Pace, and after building and exiting my own multi-million pound creative agency, I now help agency owners scale systematically. If you want to build a business that gives you more profit and the freedom to enjoy it, set up a discovery call and where I’ll find out about your business, tell you a bit more about mine and then see how we might work together.
If you’re running a creative agency, design studio, or any service business, you might be in a position where you have no bandwidth for new clients. The idea of scaling and building a business that runs without you feels impossible. But here’s the reality: you can scale a creative business if you design it correctly.
Step 1: Specialise In One Profitable Niche
If I were starting an agency today, I would have a singular focus of the service we offer. My advice to you is to stop being a generalist. Say goodbye to “we do everything” and hello to “we’re the best at this one thing.”
To give you an idea, when I started my branding agency, we took on any client for anything “design-related”. At one point we were designing flash-based games for Coca-Cola. We did it and we did it well but this took us away from our primary focus on brands.
When you specialise, you can hone in on your messaging, dial in your outbound activities and nail the systems and processes that will ensure operational efficiency.
Pick one industry, one type of client, one core problem you solve better than anyone else. Get known for that. You can always say yes to projects you want to, and importantly, no to those that aren’t the right fit.
Step 2: Create Ready Clients
Most agencies waste massive amounts of time on client onboarding. You get the project, then spend weeks trying to extract what you need from them to actually start.
We built a client preparation system. Before any work begins, clients go through a structured process that gets them ready and prompts them for everything you need, long before you start working on the project.
This means discovery questionnaires, brand workshops, strategy sessions that happen before you start designing. Your clients show up prepared instead of showing up confused.
When we focused on this, the client journey excelled, the understanding of the client’s needs was close to perfect and because of this, the projects concluded with happier clients more often.
Step 3: Only Serve Clients You Can Actually Help
Up until now, you’ve probably been a “yes person.” Afraid to lose revenue, so you say yes to every project. Now you’re accidentally a full-service agency that you never planned to be.
This prevents growth. It prevents you from building systems. And it prevents you from scaling your business.
Let me use myself as an example. I work with agency owners looking to scale their creative businesses. My sweet spot of clients are those earning £300,000 to £1,000,000 as they’re often those at the start of the scale phase of their journey.
I do not work with retail, hospitality or FMCG because while the knowledge is transferrable, I can provide the best service to my clients in this specific sector.
Start saying no to clients outside your expertise. Create a standardised, repeatable process. You can only do that when you serve clients with similar problems and similar solutions.
Step 4: Build Feedback Into Your Process
Most agencies deliver work and never try to improve the process. My previous company was called Kaizen for a reason. We focused on continuous improvement in every area of business, especially feedback. You need structured opportunities to get feedback while you’re delivering the work and your team need to understand their blindspots and options to improve delivery and efficiency.
Build check-ins into every project. Find out what’s working, what’s missing, what could be better. The only way your service gets better is if you’re constantly optimising based on real client feedback. Do we take every bit of feedback and change our process? No, but we can review this and work out what will be best to support our own plans.
Internally treat every major project as an opportunity to refine service delivery. We had time tracking, client feedback, individual and group training sessions to remove weaknesses and strengthen all team members.
Every project should be slightly better than the last one because you’ve learned something new. When you do this, your clients will be happier and you’ll have the experience and confidence to charge more.
Step 5: Start Simple, Get Complex Later
Right now, simplifying feels scary because you work with different types of clients. But here’s the thing: the more different your clients are, the harder it is to systematise.
We need to simplify your business. Narrow down to one type of client and one core outcome. Get really good at that for at least a year before you expand.
We spent three years just getting brilliant at brand identity for sports organisations. That focus allowed us to understand our clients exact needs, build systems, deliver the highest quality work and charge a premium for doing so.
This work became the foundation of our growth phase. So start simple now, get complex later.
Step 6: Add Recurring Revenue Streams
If you’re only doing one-off projects, your revenue starts at zero every month. That’s exhausting and unpredictable. Sadly, that’s how we did it.
My biggest regret was not building recurring revenue earlier. We delivered great projects but had no ongoing contract. We were at the mercy of our clients needs instead of prompting further design opportunities or scheduling these.
Add recurring elements: digital marketing plans, ongoing design support, quarterly brand audits or maintenance plans. Give clients reasons to stay connected and keep paying.
Even adding £500 per month per client in ongoing services transforms your cash flow predictability. Our gold medal position is to have costs covered providing the stability to scale your agency.
Step 7: Fire Yourself From Everything
As the creative director, you need to fire yourself. Fire yourself from design work, from client calls, from project management.
Think about making every role in your business redundant, including yours. Someone else should know how to do what you do. Someone else should be able to handle client relationships.
This is the hardest thing any founder can do. Letting go means we need to build the systems and processes as well as the accountability in our teams. But creating redundancy gives you scalability.
When you go on holiday for two weeks, the business keeps growing instead of stopping. Without this you don’t have a business, you have a job that you’re trapped in.
To gain true scalability or the ability to sell your agency, you need to remove yourself from the business.
Start documenting everything, not for you, but for the person coming behind you.
Step 8: Know Your Numbers
So many creative business owners don’t know if they’re profitable. They’re great at design but terrible at business finances.
You need to track: profit margin per project, average project value, client lifetime value, cash flow, team utilisation rates. You need to know your cashflow forecast and the revenue you have in yoru sales pipeline.
Are you profitable? Can you invest in growth? Can you hire help? Is this thing actually working?
You can’t scale what you can’t measure. Know your numbers.
Your Next Steps
There you have it. Eight steps to make your creative agency more scalable.
Which tip was most useful for you? Let me know.
And if you want to learn my complete system for systematically scaling creative businesses, check my Selling Creative Services course. I’ll show you the frameworks I used to build and exit my agency, and the same ones I use to help creative business owners today.
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Supporting creative entrepreneurs through this journey is what I do every day. Your creative business can run without you, but only if you build it systematically.
Let’s go!