EPISODE 9: Nobody Wants Your Agency Services

Nobody wakes up in the middle of the night wishing they had more design. Nobody wants a website, or SEO, or a retainer. They want what those things get them - more customers, more sales, a business that’s easier to find and easier to trust. Which is obvious, and yet almost nobody in the industry sells that way.In episode 9, Callum puts Gareth in the hot seat on why the standard agency model - a list of services offered out into a market already full of near-identical lists - is under threat, and why the answer is to stop selling services and start selling named, fixed-scope, outcome-led products.It’s a conversation that takes in a plumbing leak, a pitch day, and a workshop Gareth ran this week that surprised the agency in the room.In this episodeThe business model is under threat, not just the marketing. Thousands of agencies, more added every day, all offering the same services under the same names. Add AI doing work that only people could do a few years ago, and skills that were once opaque (design, before Canva) now open to anyone. Differentiation is part of the answer, but Gareth’s point is wider than that: it’s a different way of working.Nobody wants the diagnosis. They want it fixed. Callum on his own STANDOUT AI audit: nobody wants the audit, and they don’t really want AI implementation either. They want more margin, more growth or more control. Gareth’s version is the plumber. When the leak appeared he didn’t want a plumber, he wanted the leak fixed, and wouldn’t have cared who or what did it. A plumber sells an urgent need and never has to dress it up. Agencies solve needs just as real - falling market share, not enough customers - but the need is latent rather than urgent, so it has to be made visible.Hard to sell, and harder to buy. Every brief gets scoped from scratch. Meanwhile the client is looking at thousands of agencies listing the same services, without fully understanding what those services do or in what order they need them. The pitch day exists because clients are trying to de-risk a decision they can’t otherwise make.Why vague offers get priced down. A callback to episode 3, Nobody Agreed the Height of the Wall. If the offer is vague, the client compares on price and the agency spends more unbillable time to earn the same money. Callum sees it in estimation: a blank page every time, and every hour of it eroding margin. AI, usefully, forces the issue - you can’t use it to estimate until the service is defined well enough for it to know what it’s estimating. He’s working with a client on exactly that, tiering new projects against the data from old ones.What a productised service actually is. Not a new service. The skills you already have, packaged around the outcome for the client rather than the service itself: a name, a defined scope, a fixed price, a stated timeframe, and clarity on what the client gets and how it’s delivered. The service still sits at the core. But a client can say “I can buy that” and know their commitment and their risk - rather than signing a retainer whilst quietly thinking “let’s see how it goes”. And it gets better every time you sell it: run the same product three or four times and you can see what worked, what was missing and where the effort was wasted.Name the problem, not the deliverable. Gareth’s caution: this is not tweaking a few words on the website, it’s a shift in how the business runs. And a productised service has to solve a client problem, so “Brand Identity Sprint” is the wrong name for something whose real job is telling the market who you are, what you stand for and why they should pay. The headline is the problem. The method comes after.Three types of productised service. The productised service proper - your existing skills, packaged. The technology or AI product - a tool or skill the client uses directly, no human in the loop. And the hybrid in the middle, where technology does the work but you still guide the client through it. The test is whether the client interacts with the technology or whether it’s your internal tool. Two things trip agencies up on the hybrid route: hourly pricing (do it faster, invoice less) and the absence of standard operating procedures - which is an episode of its own, coming soon.What Gareth wants listeners to do this week. Get your senior people in a room and list the problems your work solves, not the services you offer. Gareth did this with an agency this week and everything on the whiteboard fell into four clusters - and the highest-value clusters weren’t the bulk of the work. Being fast and nice to work with doesn’t count; those are hygiene factors. The value is commercial. Then build the product backwards from that. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestandoutagencypodcast.substack.com