The Pricing Model That Led to 8-FIGURE AGENCY GROWTH with Graeme Barlow | Ep #645

Are you struggling to scale your digital agency to 7-figures and beyond? Do you think 8-figure or 9-figure agency owners must have it all figured out? Today’s guest shares the journey of taking his smaller agency to an eight-figure business and discusses the strategies that helped him scale and grow. He talks about the huge impact their transparent pricing model had on their growth, why he’s still figuring out a marketing strategy that will not depend on referrals, and how he’s changed his mind about the remote model. Tune in to hear more about Graham's experiences and insights as an agency owner.

Graeme Barlow is a tech entrepreneur who has built and sold several startups in the space and is currently the owner of Iversoft, an agency that builds custom software for brands all over the world. The agency specializes in mobile but dabbles in backend web development and works with creative agencies to complement their engineering expertise.

In this episode, we’ll discuss:

• Moving from the tech space to owning an agency.
• The pricing model that led to immense 8-figure agency growth.
• Marketing strategies to attract big brand clients.

 

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Sponsors and Resources

E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design, and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service.

 

Moving from Tech to Being in the Agency World

Many agency owners think grass is greener on the tech side of business and dream of building the new Facebook. For his part, Graeme made the journey backwards and ended up being an agency owner after years in tech. He has built products and games and seen the real struggles in tech and the opportunities as a service provider to partner with up-and-coming starters to develop cool tools. For him, it was the best of both worlds.

As an agency owner, Graeme could get access to the coolest technology around while also working with tech startups as they start to scale. However, he found it’s not easy working with unknown and unpredictable technologies.

Looking back at their impressive growth over the years, Graeme admits it took a lot of pain and suffering. When they started, it was all small fixed bid projects they could complete in a week. Nothing seemed too complicated working on mobile at a time when mobile apps still weren’t as complex as they are today. Fast forward to the present and they are now handling multiple six-figure projects at a time.

That level of growth is what most agency owners dream of but maintaining it takes solid processes, a good team, a good marketing strategy, and a lot of resilience.

A Pricing Model that Led to Immense Growth

Transitioning out of the fixed bid to a retainer model proved to be much more difficult than he thought, though a necessary step to scale.

In software, there’s much you’ll learn about user interaction when people start using it. It is extremely hard to define every possible element of software build up front, which is why the fixed bid