There was a season where I came alongside an agency owner as the business moved toward an exit.
That experience taught me a lot about what makes an agency valuable, what makes it attractive to a buyer, and what kinds of decisions shape a business over time. It also gave me a close-up view of something I think more founders are wrestling with now: the shape of the service business itself.
Even then, we were never trying to build a massive behemoth.
That was not the vision.
The goal was to build a smaller agency with a strong core. We cared about having the right people in the right roles. The focus was not on building the biggest team possible. It was on building the right capability and structure.
At the time, that already felt intentional.
Now it feels even more relevant.
Because when I look at where service businesses are today, a lot of the old assumptions about growth no longer hold up in the same way.
For a long time, the default picture of success in agencies and consulting looked fairly predictable. More people, more services and more visible scale. Growth was often measured by how much the business expanded outward.
And for a while, that picture made sense. It reflected the economics of the time, the way delivery worked, and the signals that made a business look established.
But the landscape has changed.
Technology has changed the way execution happens and client expectations have changed. The economics of delivery have changed too. A lot of businesses are carrying complexity that no longer gives them the advantage it once did.
That does not mean bigger teams are bad. It does mean bigger is no longer the automatic proof of longevity.
In many cases, the stronger business now is the one that knows exactly where its value sits.
That might be a much smaller core team. It might be a founder-led agency or consultancy with deep specialization, high-value processes, and a clear point of view.
It might be a business that keeps leadership and expertise close to the center, while being far more selective about what actually needs to live inside the business full time.
That is the shift I keep noticing.
The businesses that feel most relevant going forward are clearer about what they do, more focused on where they create value, and more intentional about how they are built.
That matters because buyers, clients, and the market all respond to clarity.
A business becomes easier to trust when people can understand what it does, who it’s for, and why its approach matters. That gets harder when a service business grows in size faster than it grows in focus.
More services do not automatically create more value and more people do not automatically make the business stronger. Sometimes they simply make the business heavier.
And I think a lot of founders are starting to feel that tension.
They’re not only asking how to grow. They’re asking what kind of business actually makes sense now. What should stay in the core and what can flex outside of it? Where does value really sit? What creates strength, and what just creates weight?
Those are better questions.
They’re also the questions that point toward a different model of service business than the one many of us inherited.
To me, that kind of business looks smaller, sharper, and more specialized. It’s not smaller in ambition, but smaller by design, with a stronger core, deeper expertise, and more intentional support around the edges.
That is not a lesser business.
In many cases, it may be the more resilient one.
I wrote more about that broader shift in my latest Substack, including why I believe we are seeing the rise of the nano agency and what that means for the future of service-based businesses.
You can read it here: The Rise of the Nano Service Based Business
