A large agency buys you scale and process: many people, formal reporting lines, and the capacity to run national campaigns across dozens of locations at once. A small team buys you the opposite trade. The person doing the work is the person on your call, decisions take hours rather than a fortnight, and nothing gets bundled into a package you did not need. The thing people assume they lose with a small team is range, and that is the part that no longer holds, because the team is built out of channel specialists rather than generalists, with one person accountable for the whole plan.
Both models work. They are built for different customers, and the differences show up in how the week runs rather than in the pitch deck.
| A large agency | A small team | |
|---|---|---|
| Who you speak to | An account manager, who speaks to the people doing the work | The person doing the work |
| Who does the work | Often the most junior person free that week, reviewed by someone senior | Senior by default, because there is nobody junior to hand it to |
| A small change | A ticket, a queue and a fortnight | Same day, usually the same conversation |
| What is included | A package, because packages are what scale | What your business needs, which is rarely a round number of channels |
| Channel range | Everything, with a specialist team per channel | The same channels, each one handled by the specialist whose discipline it is |
| Reporting | Detailed, formal, monthly, and often about impressions | Short, and about enquiries |
| Capacity | Effectively unlimited | Limited on purpose, and told to you before you commit |
| Minimum spend | Usually, and it is what rules most small businesses out | None |
The assumption is that going small means going narrow: a web person who cannot do search, or a search person who cannot build. That was a fair assumption once. It is why so many businesses end up with three suppliers who each blame the other two.
Range is no longer what separates a small team from a large one. What separates them is structure. A large agency carries a sales team, an account management layer and an office, and those have to be paid for by every account. A small team carries the people doing the work, and every channel has someone whose own discipline it is. You get the same list of channels, and you are not funding the layers in between.
What you do get from us, that you would be unlikely to get from a larger firm, is the senior person. In an agency of fifty, your account is somebody's eleventh priority and the work is done by whoever is free. Here there is nobody to hand it down to, which is a limitation and an advantage at the same time: it caps how many clients we can take, and it means the work is done by the person who sold it.
This is the part that usually gets waved at rather than stated, so here it is plainly. Paid search is handled by a specialist who spent ten years at Google working on Google Ads before moving into agency work. Ecommerce and search at scale are handled by people who have run some of their previous agencies' largest ecommerce accounts.
They did all of that individually, at other firms. What is new is that they work together on the same accounts, rather than sitting in four different agencies who never speak to each other and bill you separately for the privilege. That is the whole idea behind this company, and it is why a small team is no longer the compromise it used to be.
We would rather say this than pretend otherwise. Go large if you are rolling out across dozens of locations at once and need many people working in parallel. Go large if your media budget needs a dedicated buying desk watching it daily. Go large if your procurement process requires a supplier of a certain size, insured to a certain level, with a certain number of staff, because no amount of being good at the work gets you past that form.
For a business trading across one region, those are things you pay for and never use.
The company is young. The people are not. A small core team in Chelmsford, working across Essex, East London and the rest of the UK, made up of channel specialists rather than generalists. Six channels run as one plan: SEO, local search, Google Ads, paid social, content and website development.
The founder takes the call, writes the plan and stays on the job, and there is no lock-in contract: if the work is not landing, you leave. What we can show you instead of a deck is nine case studies, every one of them a site you can open right now.
Still weighing an agency against a freelancer or doing it yourself?
Agency, freelancer or builder →It is a different risk, not a bigger one. A large agency carries the risk that your account is small enough to be handed to the most junior person in the building and reviewed once a quarter. A small team carries the risk of capacity, which is why we take on a limited number of builds at a time and say so before you commit rather than after. Ask both the same question: who exactly will be doing the work, and what else are they working on.
Yes, because the team is built out of specialists rather than generalists. We run search, local search, Google Ads, paid social, content and website development as one plan, and each channel is handled by the person whose own discipline it is. They are not juniors: our paid search is handled by someone who spent ten years at Google working on Google Ads, and our ecommerce search by people who have run some of their previous agencies' largest ecommerce accounts. What stays constant is that the same person plans it, briefs it and answers for it, so nothing falls between two agencies blaming each other.
Scale and formality, mainly. If you need a national rollout across dozens of locations at once, a dedicated media buying desk for a six-figure monthly budget, or a supplier large enough to clear a corporate procurement process, a large agency is the right call and we will say so. For a business trading in one region, those are things you pay for and do not use.
The founder takes your call, writes the plan and stays on the job. The channel work is done by the specialist whose discipline it is, rather than passed down to whoever happens to be free. There is no account management layer between you and the people doing the work, which is the single biggest difference you will feel day to day.
Often, because you are not paying for an account management layer, a new business team or an office you never visit. That is a structural difference rather than a discount. What it does not mean is cheapest: if price is the only thing that matters, a freelancer will beat us, and we have written honestly about when a freelancer is the better buy.
Who does the work, what happens when you are busy, what a change costs, and what we are not good at. Thirty minutes, direct with the founder, and you leave with a fixed price and a written plan to keep either way.
Direct with the founder · Fixed quote on the call · You own everything · No lock-in contracts