I ran my agency in Belfast for 13 years. For the first five of those years, we had zero revenue in retained business. Every single month, we started on the 1st by resetting our revenue to zero. We were good at winning work, but we had no foundation underneath us. Every month was a fresh scramble.

I see the same pattern in nearly every agency I work with now. The work is excellent. Clients stay. Referrals come in. But the commercial engine, pricing, billing, positioning, pipeline, is running at a fraction of the level it should be.

That gap is where profit lives. Or does not.

The pattern

Here is what typically happens. You start out doing the work yourself because you are good at it. Clients love the output. The team grows. Revenue climbs.

But the commercial foundations, how you price, how you bill, how you position, how you sell, stay stuck at year-two level while the work races ahead.

Glaze Digital is a perfect example. They are a Shopify Plus partner, in the top 1.5% globally. Over 250 stores built. Brands doing over £20 million a month through their builds. By any measure, an outstanding technical agency. But when Mark Kelso and his co-founder Richard stepped back and looked at the commercial side, it was not working as hard as they were.

Mark described it honestly on the Exit Ready podcast:

“Both Richard and I were in deep. We were in deep in not trying to grow the business, trying to build the projects that we had. And we never really came above the surface to have a look at it.”

That phrase, “above the surface,” is one I hear constantly. Founders so deep in delivery that they have never stepped back to ask whether the business structure matches the quality of the work.

Over 13 months, we worked together to close that gap. The result: 47% revenue growth and 110% profit growth.

Three things that changed at Glaze

Pricing caught up to value

Glaze had Shopify expertise that was genuinely world-class. Top 1.5% globally. But they were pricing like a competent agency, not an elite one.

Mark put it directly: “The main decision was probably understanding our pricing from a customer point of view and understanding our value of where we could add value.”

When you have spent years undercharging, the fix is not simply raising prices. It is reframing what the client is buying. Glaze shifted from selling website builds to selling strategic e-commerce partnerships. The work did not change. The way it was packaged, positioned, and priced did.

This required restructuring service offerings into defined workstreams with clear starting points, timelines, and KPIs. Instead of saying yes to everything from a small button tweak to a full store build, they created a service-led model where clients chose from structured options. Each option had a scope, a price, and a measurable outcome.

Billing got disciplined

One of the simplest changes made the biggest difference to cash flow. Mark admitted something I hear from agency owners every week:

“One of the things that I wasn’t doing, and I hold my hands up, was I was waiting till the end of the month to do my billing.”

That meant a 30-day gap between completing work and sending invoices. Then another 30 days on payment terms. Two months of cash flow lag on work already delivered.

The fix: structured billing throughout the month. Deposits upfront. Milestone payments during projects. Invoices sent at completion rather than batched at month end. None of this is complicated. But the impact on cash position was immediate.

If you are batching your invoices at the end of each month, you are lending your clients money for free. Bill when the work is done, not when the calendar says it is time.

Middle management stopped being a dirty word

This was the hardest shift. Mark and Richard had always resisted bringing in managers between themselves and the team. They felt it meant losing control.

“We never wanted to bring in middle managers. And I think that may have been a short-sighted thought process because we felt that by bringing in a middle manager, we lost control.”

The reality was the opposite. Without that layer, Mark and Richard were the bottleneck on every decision, every client update, every scope conversation. They could not get “above the surface” because there was nobody else holding the surface.

The shift was not handing over control. It was defining what each person controls. Mark could still stay close to strategic client relationships. Day-to-day updates, project management, scope conversations: those could be handled by someone hired specifically for that role.

This freed up time for business development, for strategic thinking, for the work that actually grows the business rather than just delivering it.

From white-label to strategic partner

There was a positioning shift too. Glaze had been doing a lot of white-label work, building stores behind other agencies’ brands. The technical quality was the same, but Glaze was invisible to the end client.

The move was to position Glaze as a strategic partner in every relationship. Not just the build team, but the team that understands Shopify deeply enough to advise on architecture, app selection, and growth.

Mark explained the difference: “Our knowledge of Shopify as a platform and our understanding of how to do something within Shopify, whether that’s choosing the correct app or building custom functionality, is second to none.”

That knowledge was always there. The positioning just had not caught up. When it did, Glaze moved from being a vendor in someone else’s stack to being the Shopify partner that clients chose directly.

The numbers

Over 13 months of working together:

The profit figure matters more. Revenue growth can come from working harder. Profit growth comes from working smarter: better pricing, better billing, better positioning, and the right team in the right roles.

The profit growth being more than double the revenue growth tells you that the gains came from structural improvement, not just selling more hours.

What this means for your agency

If your agency does great work and your clients stay, you have the hardest part figured out. The commercial side is a set of decisions, not a talent you either have or do not.

Pricing. Are you charging for the value you deliver or the time it takes? If a client would pay £30,000 for the outcome and you are charging £15,000 because that is what the hours add up to, you have a pricing problem.

Billing. Are you sending invoices the day work completes, or batching them at month end? Every day you delay an invoice is a day of cash flow you are lending to your client for free.

Positioning. Are you describing what you build, or the commercial outcome it creates? Business owners take creative quality for granted. They want to know: how many leads, what conversion rate, what revenue impact.

Team. Are you the bottleneck? If every decision flows through you, you cannot grow. The first middle management hire feels like a risk. In hindsight, every founder I have worked with wishes they had done it 18 months sooner. Cathal O’Reilly said exactly that in episode one of the podcast.

Mark’s one piece of advice

When I asked Mark what he would tell his earlier self, he did not talk about strategy or positioning. He talked about a month, three years into the business, where there was nothing to build. No revenue coming in. Bills going out.

“It was the biggest wake up call in the whole of the business for me. Don’t ever have a month with no bills going out and no revenue coming in.”

Always be billing. Always have pipeline. The commercial engine has to run continuously, not just when the project queue is empty.

Your agency does great work. The business side just has to catch up.

This article is based on a conversation with Mark Kelso on the Exit Ready podcast. Listen to the full episode for Mark’s insights on AI in agencies, white-label vs strategic partnerships, and Shopify strategy.

Go deeper: Agency Profit Benchmarks: What Good Looks Like in 2026 | Agency Pricing Models: 4 Options With Real Examples | How to Improve Agency Profitability