The basics of running a Web Agency

About 2 minutes to read. Posted on December 9, 2020 14:00

• My definition of a Web Agency
• How do these agencies usually earn money?
• Who are the typical customers?
• What are the core aspects of running a Web Agency?

The type of comanpies I'm going to be talking about and I have experiences with is what I would call a "Web Agency". These companies can typically scale from 1 to 100 people, but are usually in the 2-30 range. It is very hard to make the leap to a bigger company. Something I will be talking about later.

Services offered by these companies are in the name. They build web solutions for other companies. These web solutions are usually in the form of CMS pages, small to medium eCommerce enterprises, marketing pages and sometimes internal efficiency tools.

These types of companies exist in most industries and work mostly in a similar way. My personal experience is from the Web / Software industry, but I assume most of what I talk about in this blog will apply to any agency.

Here again in a internet friendly bullet point list:

• Creates Web based solutions for other companies
• Usually between 1-20 people
• Often run by the owner

Of course a company can use any business model they can come up with and works for them. In general though, there are three types of models I have encountered most often:

• Fixed cost Projects
• Time and Materials Projects
• Subscription based services, usually an SLA or similar guaranties

Customers of these agencies are typically up to an order of magnitude larger than the agency itself. In addition these companies don't think that IT or their web plattform is a core competency. If they did, they would not be outsourcing that work. Sometimes a the customer is a smaller unit in a larger corporation that fits the same qualifications.

This usually means that most customers don't know much about IT internally. As a consequence these customers won't be good at any part of IT. For this reason many Agencies have tried to become consultancies, but this is usually expected as part of the package from the client and the usually higher rates don't often don't make it an attractive offering.

This is the main topic I will be writing about in future posts. The aspects I will be writing about are not about the Service side of things, so I will not be writing about Software Development or web technology. Rather I want to write about a topic often forgotten when running an agency. What are the core internal processes at work in these kind of companies?

An excerpt of topics these agencies should be concerning themselfs about:

• Time tracking
• Controlling
• Resource planning
• Commitments
  

• None yet

Thank you for reading

I hope you enjoyed the article and maybe even learned something. If you would like to stay in contact I have a mailing list or you can reach out to me via social media.